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ARISTOTLE 



Illustrated Cameos of Literature 

Edited by George Brandes 



Small Crown 8vo 



MAXIM GORKI 
ARISTOTLE 

A. C. SWINBURNE 
ANATOLE FRANCE 



RICHARD WAGNER 
OSCAR WILDE 
JAPANESE POETRY 
BAUDELAIRE, 6-c. 



NEW YORK: McCLURE, PHILLIPS &- CO. 



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'.U. 




'•^^••'— ••■ ii " •••■•|-'iN i -'; »i r ii i iii> irri iiii • i ii I • ■! ' 






Printed in England 



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I0^ROBUCriO3i^ 

T CANNOT 'BE DENIED 
that the academic expression 
''*' Literature'^ is an ill-favoured 
word. It involuntarily calls up 
the Antithesis of Life^ of Per- 
sonal Experience^ of the Simple Expression of 
Thought and Feeling. With what scorn does 
Verlaine exclaim in his Poems : 

*' t^nd the Rest is only Literature." 

The word is not employed here in Verlaine" s 
sense. The Impersonal is to be excluded from 
this Collection. Notwithstanding its solid basiSy 
the modern mode of the Essay gives full play 
of personal freedom in the handling of its 
matter. 



I3ifROBUCri03^ 



In writing an entire History of Literature^ one 
is unable to take equal interest in all its details. 
Much is included because it belongs there^ but 
has to be described and criticised of necessity^ 
not desire. While the Author concentrates 
himself con amore upon the farts which^ in 
accordance with his temperament^ attract his 
sympathies^ or rivet his attention by their 
characteristic types^ he accepts the rest as un- 
avoidable stuffing, in order to escape the reproach 
of ignorance or defect. In the Essay there is no 
padding. Nothing is put in from external con- 
siderations. The Author here admits no tem- 
porising with his subject. 

However foreign the theme may be to him^ 
there is always some point of contact between 
himself and the strange Personality. There is 
certain to be some crevice through which he can 
insinuate nims elf into this alien nature^ after the 
fashion of the cunning actor with his part. He 



lOifROD UCTIOVi^ 



tries to feel its feelings, to think its thoughts^ to 
divine its instincts^ to discover its impulses and 
its will — then retreats from it once more, and 
sets down what he has gathered. 

Or he steeps himself intimately in the subject, 
till he feels that the Alien Personality is beginning 
to live in him. It may be months before this 
happens ; but it comes at last. Another Being 
ails him ; for the time his soul is captive to it, 
and when he begins to express himself in words, 
he is freed, as it were, from an evil dream, the 
while he is fulfilling a cherished duty. 

It is a welcome task to one who feels 
himself congenial to some Great or Significant 
Man, to give expression to his cordial feelings 
and his inspiration. It becomes an obsession 
with him to communicate to others what he sees 
in his Idol, his Divinity. Tet it is not Inspira- 
tion for his Subject alone that makes the Essayist. 
Some point that has no marked attraction 



8 i:Hj'RODucrioo^ 

in itself may be inexpressibly -precious to the 
Author as Material^ presenting itself to him 
with some rare stamps or unexpected feature^ 
that affords a special vehicle for the expression of 
his temperament. "Every man favours what he 
can describe or set forth better than his neighbours; 
each seeks the Stuff that calls out his capacities, 
and gives him opportunity to show what he is 
capable of Whether the Personality portrayed 
be at his Antipodes, whether or no he have one 
single Idea in common with him, matters nothing. 
The picture may in sooth be most successful when 
the Original is entirely remote from the delineator, 
in virtue of contrary temperament, or totally 
different mentality, — -just because the traits of 
such a nature stand out the more sharply to the 
eye of the tranquil observer. 

Since Montaigne wrote the first Essays, this 
Form has permeated every country. In France, 
Sainte-Beuve, in North America, Emerson, has 



lOifROD ucriooi^ 



founded his School. In Germany, Hillebrandt 
follows the lead of Sainte-Beuve^ while Hermann 
Grimm is a disciple of Emerson, The Essayists 
of To-day are Legion. 

It is hard to say whether what is set out in 
this brief and agreeable mode will offer much 
resistance to the ravages of Time. In any case its 
permanence is not excluded. It is conceivable that 
men^ when condemned to many months' imprison- 
ment, might arm themselves with the Works of 
Sainte-Beuve for their profitable entertainment, 
rather than with the Writings of any other 
Frenchman, since they give the Quintes- 
sence of many Books and many Temperaments. 
As to the permanent value of the Literature of 
To-day, we can but express conjectures, or at 
most opinions, that are binding upon none. We 
may hope that After-Generations will interest 
themselves not merely in the Classic Forms of 
Poetry and History^ but also in this less monu- 



10 ic^(rRODucrio3^ 

mental Mode of the Criticism of our Era. And 
if this he not the case, we may console ourselves in 
advance with the reflection that the After-World 
is not of necessity going to he cleverer than the 
Present — that we have indeed no guarantee that 
it will he able to appreciate the Qualities of our 
Contemporaries quite according to their merits. 

So much that is New, and to us Unknown^ 
will occupy it in the Future I 

GEORGE BRANDES. 



^opo^o^o^o^o^o^o^c^c^o^o^c^o^o^o^c^c^o^o^o^c^o^oj^c^o^o^o^ 



PREFACE 




HILE ENGAGED ON MY 

" Critique of Language," I composed 
some studies in the history of 
philosophy in which it was my 
intention to show what the most 
eminent philosophers had done to promote or to 
hinder the progress of thought in this direction. 
This survey was too incomplete to admit of 
its publication as a whole within any assignable 
time. I therefore am bringing out provisionally 
some separate completed portions of my work, in 
the hope that they may interest the public at 
large. The present volume contains an essay on 
Aristotle, which I call unhistorical because in it I 
renounce all the piety as well as the hypocrisy of 
historical pedantry, and avail myself of all the rights 
of the criticism of the present day. 



12 TliSF^Ce 

If I have said in one place too much for the expert, 
and, in another, too little for the ordinary reader, the 
circumstance under which this Essay originated will, 
perhaps, serve as my excuse or explanation. 

The work might have made its appearance with an 
alarming display of learning if I had cited authorities 
for every statement. A few literary data at the end 
of the volume may compensate for this omission. 

Steiner and Ibsen have made us familiar with the 
notion that we carry about with us the corpses, 
and that our minds are haunted by the ghosts, ot 
our mental past. The historical pedants, and the 
Alexandrians of our own times, take these corpses 
for living persons, and these ghosts for realities. It 
may be urged, however, that the graves of those 
who, at any time in the course of the centuries, have 
been regarded as benefactors of mankind, are entitled 
at least to reverent treatment. But if we admit this 
claim without reservation, we slowly transform a spot 
which we ought to be cultivating into a cemetery 
where we can do nothing better than kneel down to 
say our prayers. But the graves of famous men have 
not all the same significance for us. There are some 



T^F^CS 13 

before which, as before hallowed places, we stand awe- 
struck ; in these sleep men who still live for us, and 
to whom we owe the best we have. There are 
others which should be preserved and cared for, 
because, though their inmates are dead to many of 
us, they are still dear and precious to the mass 
of the people. But there are yet other graves which 
exist only for themselves — sepulchral ruins which are 
preserved from utter downfall only by a vamped up 
and artificial veneration. Towards such graves piety 
is out of place if it stands in the way of life and 
progress. 

F. M. 



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ILLUSTRATIONS 

1. Aristotle Frontispiece 

2. The Central Group in Raphael's School 

of Athens To face page I 6 

3. C. Ptolomaeus. Geography, Edition of 

1525 „ 26 

4. C. V. Megenberg. Natural History, 1475 „ 32 

5. C. V. Megenberg. Natural History, 1475 „ 38 

6. From C. Gesner's Book of Animals, 1583 „ 48 

7. From C. Gesner's Book of Animals, 1583 „ 58 

8. The Unicorn, from C. Gesner's Book of 

Animals, 1583 „ 68 

9. The Sea Monk, from C. Gesner's Book of 

Animals, 1583 ,,72 

10. The Sea Bishop, from C. Gesner's Book 

of Animals, 1583 „ 78 

1 1. Aristotle and Phyllis (Hans Baldung Grien) „ 90 

12. Hans Holbein D.I. "Christ the True 

Light," 1527 „ 106 



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RISTOTELIS LOGICA IPSIUS 

Dei logica est. (The logic of Aristotle 
is the logic of God Himself.) These 
words are written in a page of my Greek 
and Latin edition of the " Organon." 
They are taken from one of the works of Gutke of 
Kolln on the Spree, a man of note in his day, incredibly 
limited in his views and, to an equally incredible de- 
gree, a believer in Aristotle. In other respects as well 
Aristotle is not infrequently compared with God. As 
a physicist he speaks the language of men, as a moralist 
the words of God. A Spanish theologian is of opinion 
that Aristotle in penetrating the secrets of nature sur- 
passed the power of man j therefore, he must have had 
the aid of a good or an evil angel. Agrippa speaks of 
him as a forerunner of Jesus Christ. Such was the 
consideration in which Aristotle was held during the 
course of some five hundred years, from the twelfth 
down to the seventeenth century. Throughout the 
vast scholastic movement of this whole period he ranked 
not as one philosopher by the side of others, but as 

B 



i8 <^i{isrorLe 

"the Philosopher." Individual opponents who, at 
this time, were already giving vent to their opinions, 
shrank from attacking him as they would have attacked 
any ordinary author of an erroneous system ; even to 
them he assumed the proportions of Antichrist. The 
opponents of Aristotle, however, had not much less 
success than the opponents of the Bible. For full five 
hundred years the Aristotelian doctrine of God and the 
world lay, like an ecclesiastical dogma, with all its 
weight on the spirits of men. 

The fame of Aristotle goes further back than this. 
Schopenhauer is wrong when, for the sake of a 
flimsy theory, he asserts that the reputation of 
Aristotle was only established two centuries after his 
death. The disciple of Plato, the teacher of Alexander 
the Great, had won celebrity during his lifetime by 
copious writings. During the later Hellenic period 
he still had rivals. But under the influence of the 
culture of Latin Christendom his authority grew by 
leaps and bounds as his writings became known. Finally 
the Arabs completed his triumph in Western Europe. 
By them the heathen Aristotle was enthroned as the 
sovereign philosopher of the Christian world. Round 
Aristotle raged the deepest controversies of the expiring 
Middle Ages, and they were conducted in the terms 
of his philosophy. For full two thousand years, from 



the world-empire of Alexander onward into the seven- 
teenth century, human thought has lain under the 
influence of this man's catchwords, an influence which 
has been wholly pernicious in its results. There is 
no parallel instance of the enduring potency of a 
system of words. 

The Renaissance aimed at a return to Plato, the 
ancient and, if we are to believe the chatter of the 
histories of philosophy, the personal antagonist of 
Aristotle. Notwithstanding, the infallible position of 
the latter in the vast scholastic movement remained 
unshaken. The scientific facts of Copernicus, Kepler 
and Newton first shook the edifice which had defied 
even a Gassendi. Moli^re still jests at the school of 
Aristotle as at a foe worth reckoning with. Sganarelle 
(in "Le Mariage Force") exclaims: " On me I'avait 
bien dit que son maitre Aristote n'^tait rien qu'un 
bavard." 

Two thousand years had to pass before the influence 
of Aristotle expired. Then, like the gods of Greece, 
he seemed to have fallen dead for ever. Natural 
science was seeking out paths of her own, and philo- 
sophy was beginning to throw off the trammels of the 
Aristotelian categories. Though the judgments of 
the philosopher, in morals and esthetics, might still 
be nominally upheld, new wine was everywhere 



20 ^liis'TorLe 



poured into the old skins. Careful observers might 
have seen easily that even in these fields the old 
flag was hoisted over a new cargo. Neither in the 
plays of Corneille or Racine, nor in the dramatic 
criticism of Lessing was the real Aristotle a living 
force. Nothing survived except the traditional appeal 
to his authority. 

Still more careful observers might have made the 
discovery that this had always been the case, namely, 
that each successive century had inculcated its own 
peculiar spirit under the name of Aristotle ; that neither 
in his metaphysics nor in his physics had the philo- 
sopher anticipated the labours of twenty centuries ; 
that in every age the collective developments of 
human culture had been referred back to him until 
he assumed the proportions of an intellectual giant. 

But the recognition of this fact, after the fall of 
the Aristotelian school, was hindered by the rise of a 
new catchword which found expression in the theory, 
then first coming into fashion, of the sacredness 
of " classical antiquity." According to this theory 
Aristotle was no longer " the philosopher " ; but along 
with other manifestations of the classical spirit, such 
as the obsolete symbols of the Greek mythology 
and the stylistic exercises of the Roman poets, he 
was treated with superstitious reverence. The tradi- 



tion went yet further. A superstitious worshipper 
of words, such as no really great thinker is, Aristotle 
compiled in his writings a general survey of the uni- 
verse. This compilation, for two thousand years, 
held all other worshippers of words in bondage, and 
even now at this present hour, the word-worshippers 
cling to the author's resounding name as to an idol. 
Schopenhauer, the resuscitator of the Platonic doctrine 
of ideas, in his criticism of Aristotle shows little 
respect for his fellow philosopher. He apparently 
denies him the right to be considered a philosopher 
since he strikes him off the roll of men of genius ; 
accuses him of shallowness ; describes his " meta- 
physics" as consisting, for the most part, of miscel- 
laneous and cursory talk about the philosophical views 
of his predecessors, and sums up the weak side of his 
mind as a vivacious superficiality. " This is why," he 
says, " the readers of Aristotle think so often : * now 
we are coming to the point ' ; but the point is never 
reached." And yet in spite of all this Schopen- 
hauer expresses his amazement at Aristotle's deep 
insight, at his teleology ; admires him even as a 
natural historian ; as often, that is to say, as it 
suits his system to do so. Sometimes he appeals to 
his fame as a philosopher, and sometimes cites him as 
an authority. 



22 ^'^srorLe 



Lewes has written a brilliant book upon Aristotle, 
in which he has exposed him as a thinker and an ob- 
server in all his nakedness. The positivist makes a 
clean sweep of the jejune natural philosophy of the 
Greek. Yet even Lewes, in his closing chapter, pays his 
humble respects to Aristotle's name : the final verdict 
certainly may considerably modify, but can scarcely 
diminish, our notions of his greatness. 

F. A. Lange, the author of an unbiased History of 
Materialism, recognises in Aristotle the archetype of 
a perverted intellect ; but even Lange stands in awe of 
the dogma of classical antiquity, and calls the Aris- 
totelian system the most perfect example that history 
has yet given us of a realised attempt to set forth 
with unity and completeness a theory of the universe. 
Kirchman and Eucken proceed on the same lines. 
They see all the spots, but look upon them as sun- 
spots, since, for two thousand years, Aristotle has been 
believed to be the light of the world. So firmly has 
Aristotle maintained his sway, even since the dis- 
appearance of his school, that criticism has never 
ventured to approach him save in the most ceremonious 
terms and with the observances of an almost Byzantine 
etiquette. Not very long ago a professor of philosophy 
branded as sacrilegious a harmless joke against Aristotle, 
made in the course of casual conversation, namely, that 



^"jRjsroTLe 23 



he was the "special pleader" for the dark Middle 
Ages. 

Thus the superstitious belief in names clings 
from days of old until now to the very syllables of 
that of Aristotle. The five hundred years, during 
which he was spoken of as the unique source, 
the infallible teacher of all sciences, have certainly 
passed away. Yet his name is still mentioned with 
conventional respect as that of the father of all sciences. 
In reality he was one of the fathers of Christian 
theology, though not of the Christian view of the world. 
Christendom has derived from the Neo-Platonists its 
deepest ideas of detachment from this world and of 
longing for the world to come. The early fathers 
were in no wise Aristotelians. Aristotle was the 
father of Christian theology only, of the hair-splitting, 
word-worshipping, scholastic — I might almost have 
said Talmudistic — pedantry of the mediaeval divines. 
In this respect his fame will sulFer no diminution. 
But when he is hailed in books as the father of all 
our natural and mental science then the writers are 
simply repeating word for word what others have 
written before them. It is impossible that they can 
have read the writings of Aristotle for themselves, or 
that they can have read them with independent minds. 

One claim to perpetuity, however, can be fully 



24 ^'BJSrO'TLB 

established, namely, that Aristotle was the father of 
logic ; at once its founder and its finisher. No less an 
authority than the great master of philosophical ab- 
straction, Kant, has vouched for this. In the second 
preface to the " Critique of Pure Reason " he says (in 
words which are often quoted and never correctly 
quoted), that since the days of Aristotle logic has 
never dared to take a step backward, although up to 
the present time it has never been able to take a 
step forward. Hegel, the great juggler with abstract 
conceptions, uses the same language. I may not be 
able to follow I. H. von Kirchman in supposing that 
neither Kant nor Hegel ever once had read the Analy- 
tics carefully, otherwise they would not have made the 
mistake of overrating them so highly, but what is cer- 
tain is, that formal logic has been expounded better 
and with more logical consistency by subsequent 
teachers than by its founder himself, and that the last 
century (from Mill to Sigvart and Schuppe) has made 
considerable advance upon the merely formal logic. 

There remains yet to be written, by one who would 
have to combine an impossible erudition with super- 
human, abnormal insight, an authentic history of logic, 
a history of human thought, and therefore also of the 
evolution of the human brain, whereby it should be 



■H 



^I^ISrOTLS 2S 

proved how mistaken in theory and how delusive in 
practice is the Hegelian doctrine of the automatic move- 
ment of ideas. The history of thought might be com- 
pared, in some respects, to the slow movement of a flock 
of sheep, many of which, in unequal and yet analogous 
fashion, make their vi^ay whithersoever a blade of grass 
entices themi The history of scientific logic, on the 
other hand, might be compared to the movement of 
the single sheep-dog, who leaps hither and thither, 
round and round the flock, barking loudly and even 
biting, but who must, on the whole, follow the trend 
of the flock. The only difference is that the direction 
of the sheep depends in the last resort upon the shep- 
herd ; while the direction of thought depends only on 
the poor blades of grass and their accidental growth. 
If, indeed, we fail to perceive that even the mind of 
the shepherd must always be guided by the growth of 
countless blades of grass, which, taken collectively, are 
considered good pasture. 

One thing, however, is clear, that such a true history 
of human thought would be only a history of human 
language. 

Of course, the history of logic has often been 
written, its history, that is to say, since the day before 
yesterday, since the days of Aristotle. As for Pre- 
Aristotelian logic, a mention of the Seven Wise Men 



26 ^liisrorLS 



was believed to epitomise all that was to be known on 
the subject. 

The idea was that there was a logic, just as there 
is a mathematics, which has existed somewhere since 
the beginning of things ; and that its history con- 
sisted in telling how the laws of this eternal logic, 
like the laws of mathematics, were gradually discovered. 
Now in the kingdom of reality there is neither a 
mathematics nor a logic ; and though there are 
invariable relations of measure between things, there 
are not any invariable relations between brains and 
things. 

The few really eternal laws of logic are paltry con- 
cerns, tautologies such as a = a. All effectual habits 
of thought must be the outcome of self-develop- 
ment. And as there was a time when no brain on 
earth had begun to think, so our habits of thought 
also must have had a beginning. And as human 
language only exists as between man and man so 
our thoughts also exist only as between man and man. 

Man has thought from the first moment of his 
existence. Human thought raised itself above the 
level of brute thought when man began, by means of 
spoken symbols, to differentiate in his memory his 
observation of resemblances. In the words " cattle " 
and " beast " a quantity of material was already 



<^^isroTLe 27 



gathered together on which the logic of later times 
could exercise itself. Prelingual thought, in the human 
sense, never existed. Prelogical thought certainly did 
exist and was no worse than postlogical thought. Our 
weightiest data of the knowledge of nature come 
down to us from the period of prelogical thought. 

It is certain that logic, as it existed, or exists 
among Western nations, was founded by Aristotle. 
This slender title to fame belongs unquestion- 
ably to the Greek, even if it should be estab- 
lished — a point to which I shall return presently — 
that his analysis of mental^conceptions is only a mis- 
understood analysis of grammar, borrowed perhaps 
from the contemporary grammatical science of India, 
which at that time had reached a high point of 
development. The question of priority, when we are 
dealing with such remote periods of time, does not 
admit of solution ; such questions, indeed, are often 
insoluble in the full light of the present. Seeing, 
however, that the first movements of natural philosophy 
among the Greeks coincided in a remarkable way with 
a cognate religious movement in the East, there would 
be nothing very astonishing in the discovery that the 
germs of the Aristotelian system of logic were of 
Eastern origin. Goethe had already noticed a 
resemblance between the Biblical exegesis of the 



28 ^TilSrOTLS 

Talmud and the spirit of Aristotle. It is unnecessary 
to say that I do not take into account those silly and 
untenable Rabbinical legends according to which 
Aristotle became a convert to Judaism or even was 
a Jew by birth and owed his profound wisdom to 
writings of Solomon which have since been lost. 

The history of Greek Logic before Aristotle is a 
history of rhetoric. The Sophists were rhetoricians 
in practice as well as in theory. One of the most 
famous among them, the talented Gorgias, thought 
nothing of entitling one of his treatises : " On the 
Not-Being, or Nature " ; so deliberately was language 
set topsy-turvy. 

Sokrates, who belonged to the Sophists in the same 
sense in which Jesus belonged to the Jews, had never 
the faintest shadow of an intention to establish a 
system of thought or logic. Nevertheless he exercised 
an extraordinary influence, owing to the fact that, with 
the innocence and indiscretion of a child, he always 
pretended not to understand the meaning of words, and 
was always asking, '' What does this mean ? " His 
irony consisted in this : that he was well aware that he, 
in his honest ignorance, was on a higher level than 
others in their perfect certitude. Moreover, by dis- 
carding the whimsical, subjective, ingenuity of the rest 
of the Sophists and by trying to find out the meaning 



<^'^srorLe 2g 



conveyed to people by every word ; further, also, by 
going back from the words to their meanings, and 
from their meanings to the sense impressions (with- 
out any system and quite in a prelogical way), 
Sokrates became the first pioneer of a critique 
of language. Yet it is as difficult to assert anything 
with certainty about the thought of Sokrates as it 
is to dogmatise about the teaching of Jesus Christ; 
in both cases our only sources are the memoranda 
of enthusiastic, but, relatively, far inferior, disciples. 
Aristotle, who was a pupil of Sokrates in the second 
generation, is impervious to the least breath of his 
spirit. 

Prantl says of Aristotle : " The best and deepest 
features of the Aristotelian logic, in virtue of which it 
is justly entitled to a place among the most remarkable 
phenomena in the history of human culture, are pre- 
cisely those which ceased the soonest to be understood. 
For as soon as the external and more technical acces- 
sories of this deep philosophically conceived logic were 
partly torn and extracted from their context, partly 
expanded by a cheaply purchased technical dexterity 
and yet again extracted, this now so-called logic was 
used almost exclusively as a mere school exercise ; and 
the emptiest heads, after assimilating its contents 
themselves, transmitted it in the same form to their 



30 <^i{isrorLe 

scholars. The consequence was that, in this succession of 
trivial logicians each one simply copied his predecessor, 
while the system in its entirety was attributed with in- 
describable naivete \o Aristotle, as its original author and 
founder. The fate which has befallen Aristotle resem- 
bles that which has befallen the New Testament.'* 

Prantl, from whose learning all subsequent his- 
torians of Western logic (including myself) have bor- 
rowed copiously, thus discriminates between two 
logics. One, which is at present taught in our 
schools, and, in his opinion, is a corruption of the 
original, and the authentic system, which he describes 
as conceived in a deeply philosophical spirit. It must 
be admitted, however, that our school logic can be 
traced back to Aristotle himself through a direct his- 
torical descent. It is his highest title to fame that for 
thousands of years he should have settled the laws of 
thought as irrevocably as Euclid settled the principles 
of geometry. If therefore our school logic is worthless, 
the fame of Aristotle in this respect falls to the ground, 
for the prodigious success of his system must not be 
attributed to him, but to the mechanical continuators 
of his work. The position, then, may be stated thus : 
Aristotle has become famous for an achievement which 
is not his own ; while, on the other hand, his genuine 
work lies buried under misunderstanding and awaits 



^ilisroTLe 31 

resurrection. I believe that I can show proof that the 
logic of Aristotle diiFers from the frightfully dry school 
logic of his continuators only in certain obscurities 
and in some extremely crude general conceptions 
under the abstract terms of which every Aristotelian, 
for the last two thousand years, has been able to find 
comfortable accommodation, in each particular case, 
for the mental requirements of his own age. Intelli- 
gent readers will not expect me to add that certain 
portions of this logic are entitled to and must receive 
respectful attention apart from the purely historical 
standpoint. Even the planetary system of Ptolemy is 
of high interest to the historian ; only as a scientific 
theory it has been ruled out of court. But if we are 
to listen to our modern Alexandrians, Aristotle's 
explanation of the universe is still entitled to a hear- 
ing. Voltaire has already expressed the situation as 
well as any one can : '' On ne la comprend guere : 
mais il est plus que probable qu' Aristote s'entendait, 
et qu'on I'entendait de son temps." 

And yet on the very threshold of the system which 
Aristotle has constructed stands a warning to the 
philosopher who has formed no conception of the 
real nature of language — a warning to which neither 
Aristotle himself nor any one who has come after him 
has given any heed. 



32 <^i{isrorLe 

What I here touch upon is the antithesis between 
" apodeictic " and " dialectic " knowledge. Already 
before Aristotle's time three kinds of thought had been 
distinguished : first the apodeictic or demonstrative 
process, worked out logically from absolutely certain 
principles, which demonstrates clearly eternal truths ; 
secondly, the dialectic, which, no doubt, is a logical 
process, but starts merely from individual opinion, 
aims at convincing the parties to the argument, and 
therefore only ascertains probabilities. Thirdly, there 
is the sophistical process, which attempts deliberately 
to prove untruths, and is plainly a misuse of logic. 
Now for the apodeictic as well as for the dialectic 
method Aristotle recognised one common instrument, 
namely language. 

At this point he might have said to himself that it 
was an extremely awkward circumstance that this same 
instrument, language, should be at one moment suitable 
for the discovery of truth, at another only for reaching 
an approximate probability, that words sometimes 
convey to us the ultimate nature of things, sometimes 
only defective notions of them. Here again also we 
see clearly the puerile anti-nominalist conception 
which led Aristotle to believe that he possessed in the 
notion of species the secret of species, the key with 
which to unlock the riddle of the universe. More- 




C. V. MEGENBERG. NATURAL HISTORY, 1475 
Various wonders of the Sea (on the authority of Aristotle) 



<^iiisrorLe 33 

over, in the use of the word logos, as is well known, 
a hopeless confusion prevails. In the same way 
even in the case of the word "dialectical," we are 
puzzled in what sense to understand it owing to the 
frequent changes in the use, especially the modern 
use, of language. The Greeks often used the word 
quite familiarly in the sense of "talk," tittle-tattle 
or "ale-house debate." 

No one has taken verbal debate, the traffic in words, 
so seriously as Aristotle. Despite Prantl Aristotle 
was the true ancestor of the schoolmen. In the pro- 
position : " God made the world out of nothing," 
he also would have explained " nothing " as the real 
substance of the world. 

Prantl, however, is certainly right in clearing his 
client Aristotle from the suspicion of having composed 
his logic merely as a set of directions to expedite 
the business of thinking, as an introduction to the 
study of philosophy, such as it came to be considered 
soon after the days of its inventor and is taught to our 
boys and, within the last few years, to our girls also. 
The use which Aristotle himself makes of his own 
logic has not the mechanical character which it 
assumed later and which Goethe was still able to 
parody, as existing in his day, under the nickname of 
Collegium Logicum. Aristotle's primary aim in his 

c 



34 z4i(isrorLe 



logic was obviously not to lay down directions for 
thinking correctly, nor to answer the question " How 
ought we to think ? " but much rather to explain 
how we do think. The process of thinking was for 
him a real object of inquiry ; an inquiry which at the 
present time we should describe as psychological. 
Now it is precisely in an inquiry of this sort that 
Aristotle, from the standpoint of his observations, is 
bound to make shipwreck. For he insists on treating 
the words, which connote his hackneyed conceptions 
of mental life, as real forces. 

There is this peculiarity about Aristotle's reputation. 
If his collected writings had been lost more than two 
thousand years ago and his authority had not dominated 
posterity as disastrously as it has done, the sudden re- 
discovery of his works at the present day would enable 
us to form an unprejudiced judgment on their import- 
ance. And I am convinced that no human being 
would suggest that this great compiler should be 
numbered among the men with whom a scientific 
inquirer at the present day would have to reckon. 
We might admire his extraordinary industry, and we 
might, with his help, be in a better position to give 
an approximately correct description of the theory of 
the Universe which was current among cultivated 



<^i{isroTLe 3s 

Greeks in the days of Alexander the Great. Con- 
sidered thus, from the historical standpoint, Aristotle's 
reputation might be enhanced. But it is exactly this 
historical estimate which is rendered difficult by the 
ever repeated attempt to bring the thought of Aristotle, 
in one connection or another, into line with the 
thought of our own time. Let us call to mind, for 
instance — to refer to a previous illustration — that the 
Poetics of Aristotle formed, during the seventeenth 
century, the code from which the French classical 
vvriters, who are still held up to the present generation 
as literary standards, never thought it possible to 
swerve ; that a century later Lessing expounded the 
same laws of criticism as though they were as infallible 
as the geometry of Euclid ; and that to-day, at least 
in our schools, they retain a conventional place in 
the curriculum of studies. The above does not 
hold good to the same extent of his treatises on 
politics or natural. science. Yet not only historians of 
philosophy, but even men who are endeavouring to 
reconstruct our theory of the Universe on the basis of 
modern knowledge, continue to rack their brains upon 
his metaphysics. Besides, his logic is still so highly 
valued that we may say with truth that in our schools 
to-day the logic of Aristotle (no doubt with verbal 
alterations) is still taught with the same authority as 



36 ^%i^T:orLE 



the geometry of Euclid. In our most widely circulated 
school-books, in our outlines of the introductory study 
of philosophy, what we find page by page is the old 
Aristotelian logic. Moreover, the time is still far 
distant when a calm historical survey can be taken. 
The religion of the Greeks comes within the scope of 
historical review ; but Catholicism is as yet outside it, and 
Aristotle has become a doctor of the Catholic Church. 
Any one who proposes to read the scientific writings 
of the ancients with any other object than historical 
instruction will perceive, after the perusal of a very few 
pages, that his pains are likely to be perfectly fruitless. 
We know that, except by means of new observations, 
any advance in human knowledge is, by the constitu- 
tion of our minds, an impossibility. But the weak side 
of the Greek mind was that they had formed no idea 
of the importance of observation. They were not only 
without our telescopes and microscopes, our ther- 
mometers and barometers, all our instruments of pre- 
cision ; the very conception of our minute units of 
measurement (by which our astronomers measure the 
thousandth point of a second, and our chemists the 
fractions of a grain) was absent from their minds. But 
this was not the worst. They were deficient, generally, 
in the sense of observation. They had no insight, 
strange as it may sound, into the value of a careful use 



.^liisrorLS 37 

of our senses. At the present day any magistrate will 
caution witnesses that they must discriminate between 
their own impressions and those which they have formed 
from hearsay. The Greeks of the classical period 
made no such distinction. At least Aristotle who, 
perhaps, for this very reason, is not to be considered 
one of their best intellects, describes pell-mell what he 
had himself seen superficially, what he had read in 
books, what he had heard from ignorant fishermen, 
hunters, and soothsayers. And if he did make obser- 
vations on his own account, he was often more inaccu- 
rate than his fishermen, hunters, and soothsayers. In 
support of this assertion I shall cite a quantity of 
examples, following, at the same time, Lewes' analysis, 
partly for the sake of convenience, and partly because 
I hope to find some small support in the authority of 
a critic who retains so much pious respect for Aristotle. 
Lewes, in his book on Aristotle, has collected a pretty 
aggregate of characteristically incorrect observations 
on the part of the latter, and has attributed them 
to the want of a principle of verification. The 
real reason why Aristotle has become unreadable by 
any one who is not a student of history Lewes failed 
to discover, because he still believed unhesitatingly 
that language is an adequate organ for the communica- 
tion of thoughts. 



38 ^IlISTOTLe 



The critic of language, however, knows not only 
that knowledge is advanced through observations alone, 
but also that all concepts of a language are only- 
symbolic abbreviations for sense-impressions or obser- 
vations. What in this respect holds good for Aristotle 
holds good also in essentials for all philosophers who 
saw the details of nature differently from ourselves. If 
we examine a living word, we find that it is a 
mnemonic symbol for our impressions. Supposing 
therefore that this same word is used by an ancient 
writer as the mnemonic symbol for his impressions and 
that these impressions differ from ours, it follows 
that we either do not understand him at all or we 
understand him in a wrong sense. We find ourselves 
in this dilemma as regards Aristotle not only in his 
use of abstract terms, but often in the simplest points 
of natural science. We have learned how hard to 
define are such words as: "subjective," "experi- 
ence," "development," "organism," "character," 
" law of nature " and so forth ; we shall now see 
further that in reading Aristotle it is just as hard 
to find true equivalents for su~h concrete terms as 
"heart," "bones," "nerves," "brain," &c. &c. 
What is so unspeakably irksome to modern students in 
their pursuit of the Greek philosophers is just this 
persistent feeling that there is often no common ground 




C. V. MEGENBERG. NATURAL HISTORY, 1475 
Snakes and other poisonous beasts 



^lilSTOrLE S9 

of thought between them and the author they are 
reading. For any one who is not occupied with the 
purely historical interest this is especially the case in 
the study of the writings of Aristotle on natural 
science. He saw nothing correctly unless it lay as clear 
as water on the surface of things ; thus he associates 
the words he uses with other meanings than ours and 
we find it impossible to follow him, not because we are 
too stupid for him but because he is too ignorant for 
us. On the other hand, if we erroneously attach our 
conceptions to his words, we can of course manage in 
this way to attribute to him the modern ideas of a 
Newton or a Darwin and by so doing are guilty 
of a monstrous falsification of history. Contemptuous 
things have been spoken concerning modern research. 
Compared with Aristotle, and in so far as our know- 
ledge of nature surpasses his, it has been likened to a 
dwarf perched on the shoulders of a giant. It is not, 
however, by our research that Aristotle has been out- 
stripped in the knowledge of nature, it is by every 
schoolboy to whom the results of that research have been 
imparted. You may call hinij if you please, a dwarf 
perched on the shoulders of a giant, but in this case, the 
giant is not Aristotle but the collective outcome of past 
ages of inquiry. 

Lewes remarks correctly that Aristotle, like all the 



40 ^lilSrOTLS 

Greeks, was credulous. He did not think that he was 
in possession of all knowledge but he believed that all 
knowledge was within the capacity of the human 
reason. The contemporary philosophy of the East 
had come to the conclusion that in resignation the 
spirit of man had found the highest realisation of its 
aspirations. The Preacher teaches that all knowledge 
is vanity. Aristotle had not the faintest conception of 
such a feeling. He stands firm on the level of antiquity 
which never knew doubt in the modern sense of 
the word. In those days it never occurred, even to 
the boldest scholar, to test the facts on which his 
logical conclusions rested. When the gifted astronomer 
Eratosthenes made the first measurements of the length 
of the arc of a meridian, he assumed as a matter of 
course that the two opposite points of his measurement, 
the cities of Alexandria and Syene, lay on the same 
meridian ; but the obvious suggestion never occurred 
to him that he should first have tested this assumed 
fact and thus have avoided a gross mistake in his 
calculations. Here we have an instance from which 
we can see that the source of all the mistakes of the 
ancients — a source which has certainly not run dry — 
is also the fountain-head from which all our own mis- 
takes arise. If we trust blindly to the recollection of 
others and do not rely upon our own senses, what 



^"BjsrorLe 



else are we doing but putting words in the place of 
things themselves ? But Aristotle was guiltier than 
others, for as the father of Logic he drew conclusions 
from words without having first brought these con- 
clusions to the test of facts. 

*' What is termed the explanation of a phenomenon 
by the discovery of its cause is simply the completion 
of its description by the disclosure of some inter- 
mediate details which had escaped observation. The 
phenomenon is viewed under new relations. It is 
classed. It is no longer isolated but united on to known 
facts ; as when the ascent of a flame or the fall of an 
apple are seen to be particulars of a general fact." 

From this truth Aristotle, perforce, stood a long way 
ofF, since its first glimmerings dawned slowly only a few 
centuries ago, and even now there are some among 
inquiring minds, of whom the light has not taken full 
possession. What Galilei calls an explanation of 
gravitation, Newton of the orbit of the stars, Darwin 
of the origin of species, was fundamentally only a 
more accurate observation and description of these 
natural occurrences. These great men thought they 
had explained something because they had described 
nature better than their predecessors. Aristotle, also, 
certainly believed that he had explained natural 
phenomena. But he has never got so far as even to 



42 ^Ai(isrorLe 



describe them correctly. It almost amounts to saying 
the same thing if we assert that, in all his endless 
writings, Aristotle has not enriched natural science by 
the addition of even the tiniest law. He explains nothing 
because he has no real descriptive faculty. Whole 
chapters of this world-famed logician read like the 
pages of a fortune-tellers' Book of Dreams ; but, with 
a silliness exceeding that of the ordinary concocter of 
a Book of Dreams, he not only tells us (to keep to our 
metaphor) that the number 14, for example, signifies 
the birth of a girl, but he also gives an explanation to 
account for it. 

At the same time, in order to be fair to Aristotle it 
must be expressly laid down, that not one of his suc- 
cessors, even to this hour, has seriously taken into 
account the momentous discovery that all explanation 
is only a matter of language, and that all causality exists 
only in words. And further it must be admitted that 
the tendency to personify those abstract conceptions, by 
which we connote inconceivable causes, and thereby to 
treat them unconsciously as active and actual realities, 
is one ineradicably planted in the human mind. 
Notwithstanding, Aristotle is still fairly open to the 
charge of submitting deliberately to the bondage of 
words. At the present day a cautious investigator is 
careful to define every conception which admits of 



■■■ 



^^ISTOTLS 43 



difficulty, before applying it, and insists that the con- 
ception thus defined shall be understood in one sense 
and one sense only. If his definition corresponds to 
the common usages of language, well and good, if it 
deviates therefrom no harm can accrue. Every one of 
our investigators understands more languages than one. 
Thus he knows by experience, even without the help 
of linguistic science, that no reliance can be placed on 
common usage. Aristotle, who could not have thought 
except in Greek, draws his conclusions from the words 
of his own language, and when, for example, he tries to 
prove logically, therefrom, that one thing exists in 
another : (the part in the whole, the idea of species in 
the idea of genus, the finger in the hand, sovereignty 
in a king) the cd'nviction is forced upon us that we are 
dealing with an untranslatable and meaningless play 
upon words. The continued attempts to discover 
sources [of knowledge in the Organon of Aristotle 
remind one of the often renewed endeavours to extract 
by means of improved appliances, gold and other 
precious metals from the dross-heaps of worked out 
mines. Such experiments were tried for ages on the 
ores, they were tried for ages on Aristotle. They 
were tried so long as our forefathers had hopelessly 
unscientific means to work with. At last, however, 
the day came when the return was no longer profitable, 



44 ^AlUSrOTLE 



when alchemy was fit for nothing but the useless efforts 
of the laboratory and the study of Aristotle for nothing 
but the tasks of the school-room. 

The faults of the Organon are to be found on 
every page. It is difficult to classify them in groups. 
Grave fundamental mistakes stare the reader in the 
face. Aristotle did not recognise that definitions 
are always, properly speaking, explanations of words, 
and do not go beyond a certain recognised use of 
language. He was led by his conception of Defini- 
tion to accentuate still more strongly his over- 
estimate of language. He represented the modality 
of the syllogism, the degree of subjective truth 
unskilfully and wrongly ; and in close connection 
with this, perhaps, is the circumstance that, although in 
theory he was an admirer of mathematics, yet, like all 
his contemporaries, he was incapable of considering 
nature from any other point of view than the qualitative. 
The quantitative mathematical consideration of nature 
is of later origin, and the algebraic logic which ex- 
presses admirably the modality of the syllogism was 
certainly beyond his horizon. 

The fundamental defect of the Organon is and 
always will be, despite all that may be said to the 
contrary, the want of any point of view based on a 
theory of knowledge. Of the theory of knowledge, wh Ich 



^7{IST0TLe 45 

may perhaps be regarded, since the rise of criticism, 
as identical with philosophy, the father of logic 
never caught so much as a glimpse. Sokrates might 
as well never have lived. Aristotle regards the evi- 
dence of the senses at the bottom of the ladder, and 
the conclusions of reason at the top, as both alike 
infallible. It is because he never thinks of a theory of 
knowledge which would test these two bases that his 
doctrine of deduction is so formal, and his doctrine of 
induction so superficial. And for the same reason he 
was led in the application of his deductive, as certainly 
as in that of his inductive method, to make such 
astounding mistakes. 

Many of his faulty observations prove that his was 
a mediocre intelligence: even distinguished men, it 
is true, have made blunders. What marks him out 
in an especially unfavourable manner is precisely 
this thraldom to words, since it has the closest bear 
ing on his logic. If he had grasped the fact that all 
judgments and conclusions are to be traced back to 
perception, and are therefore contained in the words 
in which these perceptions are epitomised, the great 
formal acuteness of his mind would have led him on 
by a more logical process to a distrust of words. He per- 
sisted, however, incessantly in making words the start- 
ing point of his explanations. For each perception he 



46 <^iiisrorLe 



found diflFerent words which he termed its different 
causes, because they described the phenomenon under 
different aspects. I am quite clear in my conviction when 
I say that the histories of philosophy are wrong in taking 
his four kinds of causes to be a logical division of the 
conception of cause. I feel certain that Aristotle con- 
ceived each phenomenon as having four causes which he 
terms severally the formal, the material, the efficient, 
and the final. I might state it thus : When he 
described or mentioned a phenomenon, whether he 
had in view the specific nature, the substance, the 
series of its changes or the end it was desired to 
attain, in every case he used indiscriminately the word 
'* cause " ; and this has for centuries given rise to new 
confusions. This is especially clear with regard to 
the formal cause, by which term he designates the 
''quiddity," or essence, or nature of a thing. The 
word " quiddity " is at last dead and buried. But the 
equally empty notion of " essence " or " nature " 
remains with us still, and we speak of the " nature " 
of electricity, or the " nature " of monarchy as if the 
term conveyed something real to our minds — almost 
in the same way as when we speak of the soul of man. 
Investigators of to-day, however, will be chary of draw- 
ing conclusions from this vague expression " nature." 
Aristotle did not shrink from doing so, because in his 



system of logic indefinite notions and generalised 
notions were upon an equal footing. It seemed to 
him that it belonged to the nature of the circle to 
be the most perfect line ; from this perfection he 
drew the momentous conclusion that the motion of 
planets must be circular. The centre appeared to him, 
to be by nature, the noblest portion of the body ; from 
this he drew the conclusion that the heart, wrongly 
regarded as being in the centre of the body, must be 
the seat of the soul. For nearly two thousand years 
astronomers and physicians accepted those conclusions 
and went round and round, after their teacher, on the 
most perfect line of the circle. In passages, too many 
to enumerate, we detect Aristotle in such absurdities. 
It speaks against him as student of nature that he 
should make wrong observations; but it speaks still more 
against him as logician that he should think incorrectly. 
When, for example, he tries to prove the above-men- 
tioned perfection of the circular line by saying that, 
without retrogression, perpetual motion could only 
take place on the line of the circle, he makes our 
heads reel, even if we fail to perceive that the same 
conclusion might be drawn quite as well from the 
ellipse. 

The enumeration of fire, water, air, and earth, as 
the four elements, a division still to be met with 



48 ^1{IST0rLe 

in popular phraseology, plays a huge part in the 
physics and physiology of Aristotle. I do not intend 
to enlarge on this point, as it is clear that under the four 
elements he means something quite different from our 
notions of fire, water, air, and earth. This is one of 
the cases in which we cannot misunderstand the mean- 
ing of the ancients, because we do not understand it at 
all. In no instance where the clue to his meaning 
is lost to us ought we to accuse Aristotle of talking 
nonsense. The cord of communication between his 
thought and ours is cut. 

One must bear in mind that mechanics in ancient 
times had reached a high level of attainment. The 
great engineer, Archimedes, whose practical and theo- 
retical genius is much admired by our modern physi- 
cists, lived only one hundred years after Aristotle. 
What opinion, then, are we to form of Aristotle, who, 
so shortly before Archimedes, ventured to write about 
mechanics, and in speaking, for instance, of the lever 
(which on unequal arms sustains unequal weights in 
equilibrium) was capable of talking such philosophical 
nonsense as to attribute this mechanical action to the 
wonderful properties of the circle ? 

The authority of Aristotle only disappeared gradually 
as the sciences advanced step by step. Astronomy and 
mechanics came to maturity more quickly than the rest, 



^ttt)emgoj(fteijfd 




FROM C. GESNER'S BOOK OF ANIMALS, 1583 



<^i(isrorLe 4g 



and thus Aristotle was banished more speedily from 
their spheres. B ut up to our own day the attempt has 
been made to vindicate his importance as a teacher of 
the science of biology. As already indicated, attempts 
are still made to read into his works the antici- 
pation or the knowledge of more recent discoveries. 
There would really be nothing exceptionally to the 
credit of such a multifarious writer if, among his 
countless memoranda, put together entirely without 
regard to system, he had for once accidentally jotted 
down an observation which was afterwards for- 
gotten until, at a still later time, some more recent 
student again brought it to light. Lewes, how- 
ever, has proved convincingly that these famous antici- 
pative discoveries of Aristotle amount to nothing. In 
particular, on his observation that some fish are placental, 
Lewes makes a remark which is well worth reading. 
Aristotle had only a very vague notion of embryology ; 
he knew nothing at all about the physiological func- 
tion of the after- birth. So that, when he mentions the 
existence of fishes which bear young like mammalia, 
this observation or note has not the same sense which 
it would have if made by a modern man of science. 
The "laws" of nature were unknown to Aristotle, 
therefore, when he cites an instance which illustrates 
for us a departure from those laws, the exception 

D 



so <^7iisroTLe 



causes him no surprise — the one effect of all others 
which it should produce. I might say that the 
concept fish was so vague and undefined in Aristotle's 
mind that the existence of placental fish made no 
alteration whatever in his notion of the general term. 
The lowest stages of our natural science include classi- 
fication ; and in no single instance has Aristotle made 
our classification fuller or more precise. 

As an anatomist Aristotle is a bad observer and a 
worse reasoner. He may have dissected many animals. 
He may have collected industriously the data, procured 
from butchers and priests, from soldiers and embalmers ; 
of the muscles and nerves, of the vessels and tissues of 
the human body he was quite ignorant. The famous 
physician Galen (some five hundred years after Aristotle) 
occupies a place, from our standpoint, far below that 
of Archimedes the engineer. Yet Aristotle cannot 
for a moment be compared with Galen. 

The question, whether Aristotle had dissected human 
corpses or not, is of no importance. His mistakes would 
be only the more gross if it could be proved that he 
had made them with a previous knowledge of anatomy. 
In that case we should be forced to conclude that, 
for the sake of some logical or metaphysical pre- 
possession, he had shut his eyes to the most obvious 
facts. We might no doubt, at a pinch, understand 



^i(isroTLe 5/ 



that he had failed to distinguish between veins and 
arteries, but even on that supposition w^hat he offers 
as the best account of the brain remains in- 
comprehensible. We know from ocular demonstra- 
tion that the brain fills up the skull and is an organ 
supplied with an exceptionally large number of blood- 
vessels. Aristotle's account is that the hinder part of 
the skull is quite empty, and the brain itself quite 
bloodless. He writes as if, at the utmost, he had had 
before him the washed-out brain of a calf or that 
of a cooked goose. He does not appear to have had 
any conception of the existence of the nerves since the 
word, which certainly he makes use of, may mean all 
manner of things, such as sinews or muscles, but not 
nerves in our special sense. (The old meaning sur- 
vived in the German "nervig," and is still retained 
in the Freach "nerveux.") Again, of the function ot 
the nerves, their connection with the brain and the 
spinal marrow (he identifies the latter group of nerves 
with the marrow of the bones, and even we habitually 
use the wrong term) he had not the faintest notion. He 
is aware that there is a duct leading from the back or 
the eye, and he has therefore seen — if you can call it 
seeing — the optic nerve. But here also his observation 
is not accurate enough, and he does not describe the 
course of the optic nerve correctly ; his conclusions also 



S2 ^AiiisroTLe 



are on this point so illogical that he ascribes to the 
optic nerve the function of nourishing the eye. 

So bad an anatomist is not likely to be a good 
physiologist. 

His remarks on the cause and function of the breath 
are comical. He understands so little about the 
functions of the brain that his teaching on this point 
seems to have been even retrograde. He denies in set 
terms (so that the contrary must already have been 
maintained) that the brain is capable of sensation. It 
is the coldest member of the body and serves to 
moderate our natural heat. It surely follows that so 
wretched a physiologist could not possibly be a good 
psychologist. Yet here again we must remember in 
his favour that it is not his fault if we, with pedantic 
uniformity, insist on translating his conception -^v^tj by 
the term soul. Already in Latin an equivalent had to be 
found, sometimes in " anima," sometimes in *' animus," 
iust as sometimes we speak of the " soul," sometimes 
of " the vital principle." Yet I hardly need to recall 
to mind that abstractions such as these, with " spirit " 
and "the vital principle" thrown into the bargain, are 
no clearer to us to-day than "^vx*) was to Aristotle of 
old. We may laugh at the mythology of the Bible 
with its story of God having breathed the breath of 
life, that is the " animus " or ^uxVj ^"^° "^^" through 



^T^SrOTLS S3 

his nostrils : our self-satisfied laughter does not make 
us one whit the wiser. 

This word of apology cannot, at the same time, 
deter me from laying on Aristotle the responsibility of 
having started the psychology of the Middle Ages on 
its strangely crooked paths. Already we find in him 
the minute hair-splitting definitions concerning the 
indivisibility and perfection of the soul. Already he 
uses words for the varying capacities of the soul, 
"understanding" and "reason" and so forth. The 
passage from Aristotle's doctrine of knowledge down 
to the most attenuated conceptions of the pure reason 
of Kant is made over a nebulous suspension-bridge, of 
which the chains and girders are closely interlinked 
words. 

If the poverty of Aristotle's mental philosophy fails 
on the whole to strike us because our own psychology has 
only just begun to discard his ideas, the meagreness of 
his doctrine of the senses is all the more obvious 
because here the inadequacy of his physiology cries 
to heaven. To make matters worse, Aristotle here 
again brings his four elements into play, and the fact, 
that the senses are five in number, does not refrain him 
from connecting each one of them, where it is possible 
for him to do so, with one of these mystic elements. 
We seem to be reading one of the writings of the ecstatic 



54 ^lusrorLE 



mediaeval theosophists, but without their dilettante 
profundity and poetry. The words sound like the 
words of a chorus of countless fools : " Now it is 
evident that we must in this way assign and adapt each 
one of the organs of sense to its corresponding element. 
The eye, we apprehend, belongs to that of water, the 
hearing to that of air, the sense of smell to that of fire, 
touch to that of earth, taste is a kind of touch. . . . 
The eye is closely dependent on the brain ; for the 
latter is the most moist and the coldest portion of the 
body. . . . When there is something igneous in the 
diaphanous, there is light. When none, there is dark- 
ness. But that which we term diaphanous is neither 
the property of the air nor of the water, nor of any 
other element ; but it is a common nature or force 
which, not existing separately, is found in these and 
other bodies, in some more, in some less." 

So enslaved is Aristotle by his own terminology 
that he raises transparency to the rank of a living and 
effectual force, just as he personifies cold. 

We must not suppose that he had formed any 
notions in the least resembling our ideas of acoustics 
when he connects the sense of hearing with the ele- 
ments of air. Naturally the vibrations of resonant 
objects had not escaped his attention. But beyond 
this observation he did not go. 



^lilSrOTLS S5 

What Aristotle says and teaches on the subject 
of memory is no doubt agreeable to our modern 
notions. He has some inkling that the immediate 
impressions of the world of reality must leave traces 
behind them, traces in the brain, not, as we should 
expect from his system, in the heart. Even the loss of 
memory in old people he explains mechanically by the 
gradual hardening of the brain. He is also already 
feeling his way towards the subsequently established 
laws of the association of ideas. We must take 
very great care, however, to avoid any importation 
into his words of our modern physiological knowledge, 
which, in spite of all shortcomings, is, as far as it goes, 
to be depended on. 

Another subject on which Aristotle talks utter non- 
sense is sleep. This most everyday occurrence in the 
life ot man remains, it is true, even at the present time, 
unexplained ; that is to say, our observations and de- 
scriptions of this phenomenon are still imperfect. But 
only some old herbwoman would venture to-day to 
endorse Aristotle's opinion that people with big heads 
and small veins sleep a great deal, because the bodily 
moisture cannot ascend quickly enough through small 
veins, and because big heads cause too great an evapora- 
tion of moisture. What a satisfaction it would be to 
be able to call up the great Aristotle before one and 



S6 ^lilSrOTLE 

make him give a direct answer "Yes" or "No" to 
the question whether he had ever at any time, or even 
in one single instance, really made and tested the 
observation that a man with a big head sleeps more 
than any other man. 

His huge collection or notes which, under the title 
of " The Natural History of Animals," has become so 
famous, seems to us so disorderly and unmethodical 
that it throws the worst possible light on the logical 
faculty of this father of all the sciences. It does not 
help him out of the difficulty to assert that this dis- 
order has been introduced by later editors. For not 
even malice prepense or the most unhappy accident 
could have brought about so complete a confusion. 
Besides, the mistakes are too numerous and too gross 
to be condoned. According to Aristotle males have 
more teeth than females, not only among mankind but 
among sheep, goats and swine. 

According to Aristotle there is a species of ox which 
has a bone in its heart. According to Aristotle the 
blood in the lower parts of the body is blacker and 
thicker than in the upper ; the blood of a woman is 
thicker and blacker than that of a man ; therefore a 
man is nobler than a woman, and the upper parts of 
the body nobler than the lower. Any butcher or 
soldier might have taught him better than that. In his 



^ATilSrorLB S7 



credulity, however, he serves up still more fabulous 
tales. The hen partridge becomes impregnated if the 
wind blows from the direction of the ^male bird ; at 
certain times the same effect is produced simply by the 
cry of the male bird flying over her. The bite of a 
mad dog produces rabies in every animal with the sole 
exception of man. 

His tendency to draw logical conclusions rather 
than to observe nature is incorrigible. His state- 
ments about the viscera and the course of the veins 
are evolved by relentless logic from the greater per- 
fection of a single as compared with a plural 
origin. Hundreds of passages might be quoted in 
exemplification of this perverse process of thought. 
We have already mentioned that the seat of the heart 
is the noblest part of the human body. In the brutes 
it lies exactly in the centre ; in man it leans a little 
towards the left side in order to compensate the greater 
cold in that quarter ; for in man the left side is the 
colder of the two. He certainly makes this statement 
only because he considers the right side nobler than the 
left. 

Had he ever, if only when he was a boy, held a 
frightened bird in his hand, he could not have asserted 
that the phenomenon of the palpitation of the heart 
through fear is only observable in man. If he had only 



s8 ^TiisrorLs 



inquired of his cook, he could never have said that men 
alone have flesh on their legs. His explanation of the 
ealf of the leg in man from the upright position of 
the human body is not altogether a stupid one. Neither 
can w^e aiFord to reproach him with his fable concerning 
the effects of the upright walk of man, seeing that from 
the days of Herder until now trash of this sort has 
formed one of the favourite commonplaces of our school- 
books. It might be well to remember that geese also 
walk upright and hold their heads on high. 

It is not my business, however, in this survey to cast 
ridicule on Aristotle on account of a few venial mis- 
takes, but by copious instances to show clearly that 
the father of logic and method not only observed 
incorrectly but that he had a mind naturally unfitted 
for observation. We cannot expect him to have mas- 
tered one of the profoundest of modern sciences, or 
even that he should have grasped the simple fact that 
all explanation is simply description. Yet the really 
first-rate minds in all ages have at least instinctively 
aimed at giving good descriptions before offering to 
posterity as an explanation the analysis of their own 
special descriptive words. In this sense Aristotle's mind 
was so far from being first-class, that, on the contrary, 
he took up any word, no matter what, and accepted it 
as a description. 



<^i{isrorLe S9 



Against this is to be set the service rendered by Aris- 
totle in fixing the mould of scientific and technical 
language. But perhaps this service is more apparent 
than real ; perhaps his example and the mental defects 
of his school have only brought about an ossification 
of scientific terminology ; perhaps we are still uncon- 
sciously schoolmen as long as we credit Aristotle with 
such services to language ; we know and teach that 
all real additions to human knowledge are, first and last, 
additions to the contents of human memory — contri- 
butions to the riches of our vocabulary — that the two 
are, in fact, identical. This being so, it would be 
remarkable if the man' to whom we owe not a single 
new discovery, not a single new observation of import- 
ance, should yet in any way have increased the resources 
of human speech. In fact, he has not done so ; he 
has only tried pedantically to enumerate and arrange 
them, just as a librarian who cannot read might arrange 
in outward order the treasures of his bookshelves, or as 
a dog might keep watch over the load of hay which 
never tempts his appetite. In the writings of an 
admirer of Aristotle, Alexander von Humboldt, we 
meet with the surprising remark that the grounds for 
believing that our knowledge of zoology was directly 
increased by the military expeditions of Alexander the 
Great are little better than legendary. Humboldt tries 



6o ^liisrorLE 



in a learned manner to justify himself on this point as 
against the biographers of Aristotle. But we feel 
grave misgivings about a student of nature who allowed 
such an opportunity to pass him by. 

The deeper we look into the psychological side of 
human thought the more we see that Aristotle, even if 
his capacities had been better, was not in a position to 
understand our modern conceptions of the theory of 
knowledge. Our fundamental point of view that 
the world of reality — or the Thing-in-Itself — is essen- 
tially unknowable was, self-evidently, beyond his powers 
of thought. He added nothing to the stores of human 
memory ; he was not a discoverer, because he was 
not an artist. He petrified the language of science, 
but gave no new word to the living language of men, 
since every new word is a discovery, a creation of art. 
The standing-point from which he confronted the 
world of realities lacked the ground foundation, 
namely, the recognition of the function of the senses 
in the theory of knowledge. 

Aristotle was so little of an artist that he is, per- 
haps, chiefly to blame for the fact that the simple 
discovery, that all speech is metaphorical, had to be 
reached by a new way. He observed quite correctly 
that words are constantly used in a metaphorical sense. 
But his artistic capacity was so small that he had not 



^lilS'TOTLE 6i 



the faintest notion of the all-pervading necessity for 
metaphor, and therefore surrendered its use to the art 
of poetry to which he was a stranger, thus excluding 
metaphor from the sphere of knowledge for thousands 
of years. So little of an artist was he that he 
coined without sense and without imagination the 
new words that he could not dispense with, with 
the result that in the end his logic was the best that 
could come out of them. 

In brief the truth is this. Aristotle was not an 
observer of nature, because he had eyes for books only ; 
for that which, in the petty language of bookworms is 
called, feebly enough, the Book of Nature, he had no 
eyes at all. He was the first Bibliophile whose name 
occurs in the tradition of the history of learning. Plato 
called him the " Reader," making fun of his book- 
learning in a manner congenial to Plato's poetical spirit. 
With the eyes of a bookman Aristotle " the reader " 
criticised his predecessor's insight. Sound conceptions 
of the relation of the earth to other heavenly bodies he 
rejected, principally because the notion of " above " 
confused him ; the notion of "below" seemed to him 
to be the more contemptible. The union of two sexes 
in the blossom of a plant he rejected because plants 
could not be more perfect than brutes. He was steeped 
in book-lore down to the depths of his soul. We shall see 



62 ^"RISTOTLE 

directly how his doctrinaire treatment of this book-lore 
was closely connected with his belief in the reasonable- 
ness of creation, and was, therefore, admirably suited 
for adaptation to the Christian view of the Universe. 

Plato's remark admits of a general application. The 
philosophers of the school of Aristotle were " readers," 
men with eyes for books only. They thought that 
they saw what was to be found in Aristotle. What 
was not to be found there they %aw^ but were deter- 
mined not to see it. It is related of Cremonini, the 
contemporary and colleague of Galilei, that he re- 
fused to go on looking through the newly-invented 
telescope because the moons of Jupiter, which had just 
been discovered, had no place in the astronomy of 
Aristotle. To such an extent were the Aristotelians 
subservient to the words of their master.* 

* I might have known that some of the pictures inserted in 
this volume would be regarded simply as decorative illus- 
trations. 

The geographical and zoological drawings are taken from 
scientific works which had a wide circulation in the early 
days of the Printing Press ; one is from an atlas in the 
geography of Ptolemy ; another from the zoology of the 
remarkably meritorious writer, Conrad Gesner; a third 
from the Natural Philosophy of Megenberg. The prints of 
imaginary and fabulous creatures and those of erroneous 



<^1lIST0rL€ 63 



The great number of his astonishing mistakes would 
not tell so much against his mental capacity if one 

maps (one of the latter, in which the African coasts are 
prolonged eastwards as far as China, thus placing the Indian 
Ocean in a position analogous to that of the Mediterranean, 
was unfortunately not accessible while these pages were in 
the press) are intended to illustrate the unscientific attitude 
towards nature resultant from the ascendency of Aristotle as 
a teacher. The Aristotelian School is not treated unjustly in 
this collection. I have tried to show with what sort of eyes 
its teachers looked at nature. Megenberg generally appeals 
directly to Aristotle as the authority for each of his 
fabulous animals, Gesner, certainly, in the case of the 
Unicorn. But even in this instance Aristotle did not 
omit to furnish proofs where there was nothing to prove 
and assigns a higher dignity to the single horn on account of 
its central position in the animal's forehead. The photo- 
graph from an antique statue shows how an ancient 
sculptor represented Aristotle, if, that is, the letters of the 
inscription do not point to the conclusion that the artist 
meant to represent Aristides or Aristippus and if the 
head and the body of the statue belong to each other. How 
Raphael portrayed the earthly Aristotle beside the more 
heavenly Plato is made known to us by the central group in 
the " Schools of Athens." Here I am taking as proven what 
is in the highest degree probable, that in the " Schools of 
Athens " (this name is not much more than two hundred years 



64 zA'^srorLS 

were able to put down to his account an equal number 
of instances in which he had hit the mark. But this 
is precisely what we are unable to do. Besides, it 
is a matter for serious consideration to what extent 
some very minute error may, occasionally, invalidate 
a man's claim to the possession of any scientific 
thought whatever. When, for example, he says that 

old) Aristotle is represented as Trendelenburg and Springer 
have declared and that Hermann Grimm's defence of the old 
misconception, that Raphael had here given a portrait of 
St. Paul, is not to be taken seriously. 

Some caricatures also were necessary in order that the 
reader might see for himself in what manner of form the 
scholastic philosopher appeared to the imaginative artists o^ 
the age of the Reformation. In the fine woodcut of Grien's 
we see Aristotle as a squire of dames. He is bridled like 
a saddle horse, a woman is seated on his back. The "motif" 
is one that often recurs. We find it in a drawing by an 
anonymous master in the Amsterdam museum. It was in 
keeping with popular taste, in those times, to turn the 
intellectual Heroes of antiquity, even the magician Virgil, 
into heroes of amorous adventure. The insignificant 
kalendar'drawing of Holbein shows the philosopher of the 
scholastic theology in nearly the same aspect as that in which 
Luther saw him as a Prince of Darkness. At the head of 
the Clergy Aristotle falls headlong into the Abyss. 



^T^SrOTLS 65 



a drop of wine in a large vessel of water becomes 
water, such an assertion might be pardoned in any 
person engaged in business, such as a cook, or a wine 
merchant, or a physician. But the father of logic and 
method has no right to let slip such a statement, if he 
is not to lose his reputation among his contempo- 
raries as a scientific thinker. Aristotle saw — and, 
considering the imperfect instruments of investiga- 
tion at men's disposal in his day, saw rightly — that 
a drop of wine infused in a vessel of water was of no 
experimental significance ; it had, therefore, no interest 
for him, and he allows the change of wine into water 
to be assumed. The chief absurdities of his writings 
on natural science may be traced back to the childish 
attempt to prove that throughout nature there exists 
some such principle of utility, which to him appears of 
exclusive importance. It is true that this teleological 
conception of the universe was first upset, for the best 
thinkers, by Spinoza, and that it still obtains accept- 
ance among the mass of mankind. But we seldom 
meet with such a striking instance of the constantly 
blinding effect of such an imaginary utility as in the 
case of Aristotle. A man of his calibre, naturally, does not 
stand on the same footing with the charlatan who, for 
the sake of personal advantage, voluntarily allows him- 
self to be misled. But intellectually he is not much 

£ 



66 ^liisroTLe 

better when, in dealing with the anatomy of animals, 
he sees in a false light whatever appears to his credulous 
simplicity to be of universal usefulness in the animal 
kingdom. 

This eternal search for the point of utility, this notion 
of the end or of design, brings us, however, at last to 
the kernel of his fallacies. 

I look upon the current derivation of the word 
" metaphysics " (what comes after physics) as a primeval 
joke of the learned. Aristotle, at all events, always calls 
this part of his system " the First philosophy " ; first 
not in order of time, but of value. His metaphysic is 
to him the most important part of his philosophy. Yet, 
in truth, it is only an initial essay, which calls for 
apology rather than admiration. The effects of this 
book (in which the unprejudiced reader, according to 
Lewes, misses the co-ordination and systematic develop- 
ment of the subject, which one would expect in amodern 
work) were not small. For centuries it held in check 
the materialistic theory of the world, which is not the 
final nor the best stage of knowledge, but is yet one 
through which we must pass in order to reach at last 
the ultimate standpoint of a critical philosophy. 

In the long run, the metaphysics of Aristotle and the 
rationalised de-christianised system of divinity, which 
usurped the name of Christian theology, became fully 



^"RisroTLe 67 

amalgamated. Even the eighteenth-century religion 
of reason takes its stand on the metaphysics of Aristotle. 
The scoffer Voltaire himself is under its sway, when 
(always with an exclusive reference to his treatment of 
morals, and with a touch of superciliousness) he says : 
" La morale d'Aristote est, comme toutes les autres, 
fort bonne : car il n'y a pas deux morales. Dieu a mis 
dans tous les cceurs la connaissance du bien avec quelque 
inclination pour le mal." 

The God of Aristotle and of this theology is not the 
maker of the world only ; no, he is the worker of the 
miracle of metaphysics, inasmuch as he is at once first 
cause of the universe and its final end, at once its 
substance and its form, its potentiality and its actuality. 
Aristotle was the first to teach how to play catch-ball 
with the notion of potentiality. If the potential is 
actual or active, then certainly the whole scholastic 
system is acquitted on the charge of senselessness, and 
all teleology as well has a clear meaning. 

Moliere makes his Aristotelian ask : " Si la fin nous 
peut emouvoir par son ^tre r6el, ou par son 6tre inten- 
tionnel ? " His French expositors treat this as a madcap 
jest devoid of meaning. This it certainly is not. 
Moliere has nailed to the counter with one short, 
sharp blow the distinctive puzzleheadedness of the 
Aristotelian, " Are final causes something actual xa 



68 ^lilSrOTLS 



themselves, or do they operate after the manner of 
human intentions ? " 

It was not Aristotle's belief in conceptions alone 
that was congenial to the Christian view of the world : 
still more congenial was the way in which he brought 
natural phenomena under notions of value. The 
Aristotelian conception of design is a conception of 
value, and goes very far beyond the natural conception 
of design which human speech in its anthropomorphic 
way usually attributes to nature. Aristotle created 
teleology in its coarsest form, and rather prides himself 
on having sought for traces of design everywhere. At 
the same time, he never laid a general foundation 
for his conception of design, but borrowed it, without 
examination, from common speech. We certainly 
owe countless suggestions and beautiful observations 
to the teleological view of nature : only, in such 
cases, the notion of design invariably supplies merely 
a stimulating question and not a satisfactory answer. 
Aristotle, however, with a childlike confidence already 
sees the answer in the question. He always sets his 
mind at rest too soon. 

His often repeated assertion that nature does 
nothing in vain seems to me to contain the pith of 
his erroneous natural philosophy. Aristotle thinks that 
he knows something where no other man has any 




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2 « 

Q < 

. • <" 

K 8 

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W CI 

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^ r 



knowledge at all. The assertion only sounds more 
impressive, but is quite as unverified and unverifiable as 
the exactly equivalent dictum : that nature aWays 
pursues an end. The whole theory is drawn from the 
notion of design as it is found in current speech. All 
the monstrosities of later teleology are thus already to 
be found in Aristotle. Already he has the maxim that 
nature always makes the best of possibilities, in fact 
that optimism which Voltaire regarded as ridiculous 
and Schopenhauer as ruthless. Already he has the con- 
temptible doctrine that plants exist on earth for the 
sake of the brutes, and the brutes for the sake of men. 
His whole attitude towards nature is grounded on the 
arrogant assumption that nature is to be appraised in 
proportion to the service which it can render to man. 
That might be merely a commonplace. In thought or 
speech we never get out of the anthropomorphic groove. 
Aristotle alone contrives to set up a standard valuation 
on a still narrower and more restricted scale. He values 
the brutes in proportion to their resemblance to man. 
But then the male sex is his sole criterion, and woman 
appears to him as mutilated man. Then again, as the 
free-born Greek, he sets up another standard, and the 
slave appears to him as a slave from birth, made by 
nature of inferior value. Hence we are not astonished 
when we meet with " inferior numbers," " inferior 



70 ^^lilsrOTLE 



veins," i' inferior dimensions"; "before" is superior 
to " behind " ; " above " is superior to " below." 

The criterion of value is the weak point of teleology. 
For the rest, we are to-day about as wise as we 
were two thousand years ago, and, with an incom- 
petence like that of Aristotle, we term phenomena 
"accidental" which at the time of their occurrence 
we are unable to explain in their cause or end. I 
have, in my "Critique of Language" (III. 504), 
sought to show why the notion of design, even in our 
modern natural science, has not yet become obsolete. 
" Conformity to law is the latest mythology which man 
has foisted upon nature. It is the fundamental error 
of modern natural science that it has turned ' necessity ' 
and * conformity to law ' into interchangeable terms." 

The criticism of language has at last recognised that 
the two highways which must lead us to the summits 
of human knowledge — deduction and induction — are 
only two paths at the junction of which stand the words 
or concepts of human speech ; in such a way indeed 
that induction forms the word just as aqueous 
vapour ascending under the influence of the sun's 
rays is condensed by them, while deduction analyses 
the word and concept, just as the mountain 
spring sends down its waters from above and dis- 



^"^STOTLS 71 



tributes them through the valley below. This distri- 
bution of the word, this analysis of the concept, 
Aristotle has striven to compress within the channels 
of his syllogistic method. And because he held this 
method to be the essential factor in the process of 
thought, and yet at the same time acknowledged that 
mankind also thought inductively, there was no other 
course open to him than to reduce, in an unintelligent 
way, induction, which he had also rightly discovered, 
to the form of a syllogism. He asserts that the 
inductive method, which ascends from particulars to 
generals, descends from generals to particulars. But, 
at the same time, he completely fails to perceive the 
psychological antecedents of induction, which with 
him is certainly not the ripe result of intellectual 
activity, but a groping about amid accidental analogies, 
a dilettante attempt at guidance or persuasion by means 
of illustrations. He never saw clearly the distinction 
between a genuine induction and the syllogistic 
formula. Under the name ot induction he draws 
utterly puerile analogical conclusions with all the 
nonchalance of an ignoramus. And his reason for so 
doing is that he sees a pervading analogy between the 
conscious thought of mankind and the unconscious 
operations of nature. The notion of design, already 
referred to, misleads him into taking illustrations for 



72 <^i{isrorLe 



proofs ; for since he is unable to pierce below the 
surface of nature, in the place of living nature he 
substitutes his dead logic. If he proves logically 
in this way that there must be inhabitants of the 
moon who correspond to the igneous element in that 
planet, such teaching is not worse than a hundred 
chimeras of the same sort which are to be met with in 
the visionaries or the Middle Ages. Only in his case 
they shock us more, because he is in no sense a 
visionary, but a common-place selt-confident person 
who thinks that he is only applying his logical method 
in the most matter-of-fact w^ay. Nietsche has called 
him a " bourgeois." 

The applied logic or Aristotle consists in the general- 
isation of examples. He thinks like the Englishman 
who, because the first person he came across on 
landing in France happened to be a red-haired, 
deformed waiter, wrote in his diary, " The French are 
red-haired and deformed." Not even in mathe- 
matics, although there the single example is some- 
thing more than an example, would such a conclusion 
be approved ; for the ground of knowledge is seldom 
or never the ground of reality. In natural science, 
where perhaps no general ground of knowledge exists, 
where all explanation can only be description, such 
inductions are criminal. 




FROM C. GESNER'S BOOK OF ANIMALS, 1583 
The Sea Monk 



^TilSTOrLS 73 



If the applied logic of Aristotle startles us to such a 
degree by reason of the contrast between the scientific 
claims of his method and his invincible credulity, the 
principle of his theoretic logic leaves us in hopeless 
bewilderment. There are decisive instances in which 
this often acute intellect betrays an amazing obtuse- 
ness. This phenomenon may perhaps be accounted 
for on psychological grounds, if we assume the cor- 
rectness of a supposition, the better establishment or 
refutation of which I should like to recommend to the 
earnest attention of Sanskrit scholars. It appears that 
P^nini, the perfecter of the Indian grammar, and a 
contemporary of Aristotle, manufactured out of the 
notional categories of his predecessors a system of 
formal grammatical categories. The science of 
etymology as practised among the Indians of Aristotle's 
time (a science which subsequently in the nineteenth 
century made good its claim to form a complete 
branch of Western culture) would have been, with its 
inquiries into the parts of speech, into the roots and 
constructive elements of language, impossible had it 
not been preceded by an accurate analysis of concep- 
tions, what we now, perhaps, call logic. Now it 
would be quite within the bounds of possibility, and 
amusing as well, to suppose that Aristotle by some 
means or other had become acquainted with this 



74 ^A'JRJSrOTLS 



contemporary Indian grammar, which took for granted, 
without making any more express mention of it, the 
logical analysis of conceptions, and had, amid mistakes 
and confusions, again contorted this system of grammar 
back into a system of logic. On this assumption his 
logic is founded on a grammar which he did not 
understand. That his logic is based on an elementary 
philosophy of language has, as a matter of fact, been 
rightly perceived. To illustrate, in connection with 
Indian grammar, the above-mentioned obtuseness of 
Aristotle, a single example or suggestion will suffice. 
In the seventh chapter of his Categories he uses the 
word which in the later Western grammars signifies 
the " cases" of the substantive ; he uses it still in the 
general sense of an " element of construction " ; but 
while the contemporary Sanskrit grammarians had 
already thoroughly investigated the formative elements 
of words Aristotle adopts what is obviously a technical 
term without clearly understanding its technical mean- 
ing. In instances such as these Aristotle talks 
nonsense. Just as in natural science he makes 
astonishing mistakes, because he treats the notions of 
species and the physical notions of the common 
speech as if they corresponded exactly with reality, so 
in precisely the same way, in his Mechanic of 
Thought, he represents the abstract and more abstract 



<^iiisrorLe 75 



notions wrongly, because he assumes, in good faith, that 
the accidental analogies of his mother tongue, /.<?., the 
Greek grammar, the categories of the spoken sentence 
are necessary and generally valid categories of thought. 
But that he was acquainted with the methodically 
arranged grammar of an Indo-European language appears 
to me to be an hypothesis which cannot be rejected. For 
only thus can it be explained that while, on the one 
hand, he was unable to differentiate the parts of speech 
of his own language, he yet, on the other, set up logical 
categories which in most points correspond to a subtly 
elaborated grammar. It would be quite in keeping 
with the speculative tendency of the Greek mind if 
Aristotle had been acquainted with some such monstrous 
Indian grammar and had misunderstood it logically and 
metaphysically from beginning to end and had uncon- 
sciously transformed it. Some test instances must 
be given to illustrate my assumptions, which at first 
sight are bound to appear mere moonshine to classical 
philologists. 

First of all, there is the phenomenon of the negative 
in human speech. 

On his notion of the negative, Aristotle has 
constructed the largest portion of his logic, almost 
his entire teaching concerning judgment and the 
inference. Moreover, his metaphysics weary us ad 



76 ^"RISrorLE 

nausea?7i by their ever-recurring opposition between 
being and not-being. In his presentation the concepts 
negation, contradiction, and opposition jostle each 
other in complete confusion. He transfers verbal 
negation to the world of reality, calls it contradiction, 
and even out of this nonentity creates his world. 

I do not think that the fact propounded can be more 
clearly expressed. The negative, as expressed by the 
little word "no" and its correlatives, is a reality, but 
still only a reality of human speech. In the last resort 
— as I observe in other places — this negative is the 
strongest expression of our subjectivity, of our 
egoism, of our " I." When a child refuses food 
by a determined shake of the head, he makes use of 
the most expressive symbol of negation. All negation 
means essentially : "I will not," or, what comes to 
exactly the same thing, " I can not." When all is 
said and done, all negations involve refusals of this 
sort. If it is suggested to me that I should call some- 
thing black white, a dish is offered to my intellectual 
" Ego " which I don't like. I try, for instance, to 
associate mentally the word " raven " with the notion 
of "whiteness." My brain neither can nor will admit 
the association. And just like the child I vigorously 
shake my head at it. 

Aristotle, besides, like many men after him, allows 



^T^STOTLS 7y 



himself to be deceived, by an accident of language, 
into thinking that all the dijBferentiations of speech 
rest upon a real foundation (as if there existed in the 
highest regions of thought, as the philosophers suppose, 
a metaphysical popular etymology). In the instance 
we are speaking of we meet with certain contrasts 
in speech which are expressed by " no," " not," the 
prefix " un," and so forth, and others in which we 
employ positive terms. In my opinion, the decision 
whether we shall employ one or other kind of negative 
depends entirely on our own egoistic convenience. 
The man who is useful to us (that is, in the long run, 
to our social conditions), and the man who is injurious 
to us, have both such an important bearing on our 
well-being, that we use distinctive words, " good " and 
" bad," to describe the two types of character. We 
are so sensitive to the impressions of light that we find 
it fitting to express our sense of their most extreme 
contrasts by the two words " black " and " white." 
We do not say unbad or unblack. Since our know- 
ledge of ^truth is less intimate we have as the negative 
of " true " " untrue " as well as " false." 

Thus it is a matter of chance, that is to say, de- 
pendent upon loosely co-ordinated observations whether, 
in our language, we employ a negative or not to express 
any relationship which we have experienced as contrast 



78 ^i{isroTLe 

or contradiction. In the outer world of reality, how- 
ever, no such negative, no such contrariety exists at 
any time or under any circumstances. If I call some 
person positively a criminal or negatively a " ne'er-do- 
well," the same person, in the world of reality, is never, 
at any time or under any circumstances, the negative 
of the respectable man, but is, in the most real sense, 
quite as positive as the latter. " Odd " numbers are 
not less positive than " even " numbers. Aristotle, on 
the other hand, treats the negations of language as 
a form of the phenomena of reality and, in his logic, 
employs negative judgments, as if the negative corre- 
sponded in someway to something in reality. 

A lucky instinct (or the discretion of his Indian 
sources) restrained Aristotle, however, from including 
the conception of the negative in his ten categories. 
That was an inconsistency. He had already done so 
much for the negative that there remained hardly any- 
thing more for him to do. He left it to our own Kant 
to take the last step, in whose highly suspicious table of 
categories the negative is quite seriously installed in the 
fifth place. The categories of Aristotle, in short, are 
the most glaring instance of his servile submission to 
words, and further, according to my unverified hypo- 
thesis, of his dependence on a system of grammar 
which he did not understand. 




FROM C. GESNER'S BOOK OF ANIMALS, 1583 

The Sea Bishop 

(Episcopus Marinus) 



I admit at once that these categories are certainly of 
great importance for a history of Logic, as well as for 
an historical criticism of thought or of language, 
but that, over and above this, they aflFord a strik- 
ing example of the force of indolence, of the 
vitality inherent in the mere sound of words, even 
after they have long ceased to be associated with a 
clear and definite meaning. Whoever has any sense 
of the subtlest humour of the human mind, of the 
unspontaneous humour of philosophical conceptions, 
may find occasion, in the history of the notions of the 
categories, for the freest and heartiest mirth. 

Trendelenburg reaches the core of the question 
when he remarks that Aristotle with his categories 
intended the parts of speech (or rather had confused 
the one with the other). Uberweg very shrewdly 
adds that his analysis was that of the parts of the sen- 
tence (subject, predicate and so forth) rather than of 
the parts of speech, and I would make yet another 
suggestion : that instead of " analysis " we should 
use the less respectful word " confusion." Let us 
reahse the position once for all : Aristotle found, in 
his unknown, probably Indian, sources, human lan- 
guage divided into parts of speech. He first of all 
makes the mistake of mixing up these parts of speech 
(that is to say the analogies constructed by grammar) 



8o ^i{isrorLe 

with the analogies constructed by syntax. The con- 
fusion is not carried out completely : he had a vague 
perception, that his first category, that of the " quid," 
the later so-called "quidditas," stood in the relation 
of natural subject to all the rest of his categories. But 
then he made his second mistake : that of projecting 
these, in any case, merely verbal distinctions into the 
world of realities, and of attempting to fashion his 
conception of the world, and that of all who were to 
follow him, in accordance with them. It was lucky for 
Aristotle that his sources were at least in the grammar 
of an Indo-European language ; if, by chance, (for he 
certainly could have no inkling of the resemblance 
between Greek and Sanskrit) he had worked on a 
Chinese grammar the result — from the standpoint of 
a European brain — would have been such as might 
have come out of Bedlam. 

The psychological origin of the Aristotelian cate- 
gories has not yet, however, been quite rightly explained, 
although the substantial facts have been known for 
long to men of learning I have in mind in this con- 
nection Aristotle's innocence of grammatical science. 
He was still in ignorance of our distribution of the 
parts of speech. He could not, therefore, as Tren- 
delenburg particularly points out, have changed the 
parts of speech into metaphysical categories with any 



^lilSTOTLe 8i 

conscious intent. He took this step rather, if the 
phrase may be forgiven, through sheer stupidity. He 
mistook analogies of language for the highest ideas 
in the universe. " Category " even has remained 
untranslatable because his ovtn notion of its mean- 
ing was completely vague. The first category, that 
of the " quid," wavers obscurely amidst our con- 
ceptions : " name," '' subject," and " reality." The 
third category, that of quality, wavers quite as obscurely 
between " adjective," " specific difference," and "sense- 
impression." The four last categories grope with still 
greater uncertainty about the forms of the verb. He 
seems to try at haphazard to provide special categories 
for intransitive and transitive verbs, for the active and 
the passive voice. Special categories for the separate 
cases of the noun, for the tenses and persons of the 
verb he does not give — an omission arising more from 
ignorance than for any better reason. 

His doctrine of the categories is the foundation of 
his logic and of his metaphysic ; but it was con- 
structed out of prelogical, pregrammatical thought, 
only to fall again under the ban of common speech, 
in spite of all efforts to form clearer conceptions 
than those which common speech conveyed. The 
system of categories is prelogical because it falls per- 
sistently into the schoolboy's blunder of making hasty 

F 



82 ^liisrorLB 

generalisations, because it is satisfied, in countless 
instances, with correct or incorrect illustrations where 
proof ought to have been demanded. And this very 
book which has supplied the terminology for a porten- 
tous mass of literature, which has also tempted even 
Kant to outbid it, was only, after all, an unlucky 
attempt to convert the common abstractions of 
current speech into a supposed science of reality. 
So weak is this attempt that even Kirchmann, with 
all his reverence for Aristotle, is forced to say that the 
process of thought is sometimes poor and sometimes 
superficial, while philological exponents are placed 
in the dilemma of having to account for the whole as 
a work of the philosopher's youth or as a popular 
treatise or even to regard single chapters as forgeries. 

This pregrammatical mental attitude of Aristotle 
seems to me to account sufficiently for the meagre- 
ness of his system of categories. We must confine 
ourselves to him and not consider the later Aristotelian 
logic. Already among the Romans, who were prac- 
tically the inventors of our grammar, category had 
been rendered by " praedicamentum"or"praedicabile" 
— the hair-splitting difference between these two words 
concerns us as little as that between " category " and 
" categorem " — and bore a meaning somewhat similar 
to that of our predicate. It is plain, however, that in 
the writings of Aristotle Karriyopia is not yet used as a 



<^i{isrorLe 83 



technical expression, but rather signifies " that which 
may be said concerning a thing." What may be said, 
be it well understood. I repeat : the whole logic of 
this period was an introduction to rhetoric : it was 
taught in order to give the learners proficiency in 
speaking fully and methodically upon any subject 
whatsoever. The system of categories in its entirety 
underlies the " Topics " of Aristotle, a tissue of ab- 
surdities which supplied a branch of instruction which 
philosophy has no longer the effrontery to uphold. This 
work, which once upon a time had a reputation equal 
to that of the Logic, belongs to the class of books which 
undertake to teach the art of poetry in twenty-four 
hours. It is a talker's manual, a guide to the art of 
turning out stereotyped phrases on any subject which 
the speaker chooses. The categories form the most 
advanced syllabus of this school of talking. Nothing 
is easier than to keep the tongue in motion when one 
has learned by heart that one must first posit one's 
horse and one's journey as a fact and then add in 
consecutive order the characteristics of quantity and 
quality, space and time. 

It would be superfluous to say anything about these 
exploded " Topics " of Aristotle, did they not reflect 
very clearly the general features of ancient thought 
and its philosophies. Up till now we have seen that 
Aristotle, in the two fundamental positions of his logic, 



84 ^^ijisrorLB 

the doctrine of the negative and the doctrine of the 
categories, made the extant forms of speech the objects 
of a superstitious cult as though they had been actual 
deities ; for he blindly transposed into the world of 
reality the " No " — that is, our subjective rejection of 
a proposition — and also honoured as categories, general 
forms of speech, of which he had no clear under- 
standing, bringing them offerings and, above all, the 
intellectual offering of his far-famed realism. If any 
one refuses to agree with me that Aristotle, in the 
instances cited, in his doctrine of the negative judg- 
ment and of the categories, has shown himself to be a 
confused thinker and has never risen above a sophistical 
analysis of traditional abstract words, let him as his 
punishment be condemned to read the " Topics." 

If Aristotle had only written this work as a pastime, as 
purposely intended to teach beginners the first steps in 
the art of disputation, if he had breathed a different spirit 
into his metaphysical and logical writings, then we might 
have supposed that here we had an instance of a great 
philosopher condescending to compose a manual of 
practical instruction suited to the needs of his own day. 
Even Schopenhauer began to write such a treatise 
on eristics (the art of disputation). But the work of 
Aristotle was altogether different. It cannot be re- 
peated often enough that Greek philosophy, in many 
cases, was not much better than rhetoric, the art 



<^i(isrorLe 8s 

of the debating club, the petty chicanery of the law 
courts. It was an endless strife of words, to which 
Sokrates alone, among all the rest of the Sophists, gave 
an entirely new direction. Amid the banter of his 
conversation there is always to be heard a note of 
longing to test the meaning of words in their relation 
to reality. Notwithstanding, Plato and Aristotle 
again pay homage and allegiance to words. No- 
where is so striking an illustration to be found of the 
levity of the Greek thinkers, of their satisfaction in 
the mere fact of excelling in verbal debate, as in the 
miscellaneous Topics of the great Aristotle. Just as a 
legal practitioner, without any scruples, aims at nothing 
except the defeat of the opposite side, no matter what 
means he employs, so Aristotle, in like manner, in his 
" Topics " has no larger end in view than to teach one 
how to get the better of one's opponents and reduce them 
to silence. Now this ignoble branch of instruction, 
which was in force for centuries, which the arch-talker 
Cicero at a later date still assiduously cultivated, has 
for its two chief implements just those two foundations 
which we have learned to know as the spurious main- 
stays of logic — the negative proposition, with its fine- 
spun distinctions of the contradictory, and the system 
of the categories. 

In their moral bearing only are the " Topics " of 
Aristotle distinctly inferior to his formal Logic. The 



86 ^liisrorLE 

Logic has no greater value as a contribution to our 
theory of knowledge. Its method of argument is, to 
our notions, a juggling with words, oriental, Talmud- 
istic, but the Logic, at least, conceives its objective to 
be truth. That of the " Topics "" is, admittedly, 
the gratification of personal vanity and victory 
over an adversary. The Greeks were passionate 
debaters. Aristotle endowed their lust for disputation 
with an art of dialectic, which he ranks, expressly, along 
with that of the physician and the orator. Yet he 
gives no rules of universal validity. No ; he merely 
gives the rules of a game, the game of Greek dialectics. 
In this pastime the r$les of the propounder and 
answerer of the question are apportioned like the parts 
in a play. If the latter replies in a manner out of 
keeping with his part, the former is entitled to withdraw 
from the game. The " Topics " are a code of etiquette 
of the antique duel with words. A code of honour it 
cannot be called. Aristotle lays down the rules of 
fence common to both parties alike. 

Owing to the incompleteness of his presentation, it is 
natural that Aristotle should introduce occasionally into 
the " Topics " further amplifications of the Logic. It 
is precisely at this point, however, that his conception 
of the modality of the syllogism, that is, of the degree 
of the subjectivity of truth, plays him a sorry trick. 
Where nothing is at stake but the satisfaction of vanity 



<^i{isroTLe 87 

and an unsubstantial triumph over an opponent, it is a 
matter of indifference whether subjective probability or 
objective truth is finally reached. The professional 
disputant becomes simply a liar and a deceiver. The 
court of highest instance to which he appeals is 
public opinion {see "Topics," i. 14). Quintilian who, 
as a professor of literature, lectured on " style " 
under one of the Roman emperors, had already in a 
passage of his book turned the Aristotelians into ridicule 
on account of the pride with which they regarded their 
schools of debate. We of to-day who are the posthu- 
mous scholars of the " Topics," of which the business 
from beginning to end is only words, have every reason 
to pass a yet sharper sentence. But — as said before — 
the " Topics " and the Logic are not unworthy of one 
another. 

One and the self-same spirit dictated both. It 
cannot be called the Holy Spirit. The day, too, must 
come when the logic of Aristotle along with the cate- 
gories will be cast out to follow the "Topics" into deepest 
oblivion. In his translation of the latter, Kirchmann 
has already pointed out that this branch of teaching has 
vanished from the world of scientific thought, despite 
the circumstance that at the present time the practice 
of public disputation is carried on to a much greater 
extent than in ancient times. But the exaggerated 
terms of respect in which Kirchmann has spoken of the 



88 ^liisrorLB 



war of words engaged in by the Reformers and the 
parliamentary debaters of the present day, has prevented 
him from perceiving the difference which separates 
such controversy from that of antiquity. In the six- 
teenth century the philosophical interest in the know- 
ledge of the universe was wanting, just as it is wanting 
in the men of our own day. No doubt the Reformers 
claimed to be the possessors or the investigators of the 
truth. No doubt the agents for class or local interests 
who, since 1789, have called themselves the representa- 
tives of the people, claim to be the champions of truth ; 
but even the most sincere among them advocate 
only practical truths, not truths which concern our 
knowledge of the universe. 

For even the Reformers were exclusively occupied 
with the pre-eminently practical question of regulat- 
ing the relations between man and God. It was 
of the highest practical importance whether men were 
to escape the pincers and glowing cauldrons of the 
devil by means of indulgence fees, by good works, or 
by the more economical process of saving faith. The 
decision depended on the correct interpretation of the 
word of God. None of these worthies had a doubt as 
to the divine character of the Bible. From this stand- 
point, therefore, they were quite justified in refusing to 
cumber themselves with questions as to its origin. The 
philosophical and dialectical art of Aristotle was of no 



^i{isTorLS 89 



use to them, for they were still only in the position of 
two greedy litigants wrangling over the meaning of 
a given deed. The deed itself was not disputed. 

Of an equally practical character are the questions 
over which our Deputies fight to-day, only they are 
questions — of bread and butter, in fact. If considera- 
tions of a universal kind are introduced, they are merely 
put up for eflFect, and are seldom meant seriously. 
But neither a Conservative nor a Liberal could " argue 
a duck out of the water " by the use of the Aris- 
totelian art of dialectic. The modern point of view has 
been compressed by our parliamentary system into 
the cry of " question." Aristotle's disputants had no 
conception that it was possible, or even obligatory, to 
" speak to the question," and no Greek or Roman ever 
interrupted the speech of a disciple of Aristotle with 
the interpellation of " question." In the criticism of 
language this is exactly what is now taking place. For 
the first time since Locke's "Essay," the call of 
** question " is being addressed to words. 

But even when the Reformers and Parliamen- 
tarians disputed only for the sake of disputation, 
only in order to silence opponents, a return to the 
archaic method of the "Topics" was impossible. 
More modern treatises of this kind contain conscious 
rhetoric. The Organon of Aristotle — i.e.^ the Logic, 
along with the " Topics " — contains unconscious 



go <^'KjsroTLe 



rhetoric. The " Topics," in particular, are no longer 
suited to our palates. Nourishment, which has once 
been rejected with nausea, can never again be considered 
in the light of food. 

And yet one last trace of this archaic schooling 
lingers among us. It is certainly to be found in the 
so-called " Chrie," which forms even to-day, more or 
less ostensibly, the groundwork of the class-room essay 
in German schools. I, at any rate, between the ages 
of sixteen and nineteen, had to compose some such 
" Chrie " nearly once a month. Each exercise was 
concocted with imbecile uniformity, according to the 
rules of chatter laid down in the "Topics." These rules 
had also the same end in view as the metrical list of 
questions : 

" Quis ? quid ? ubi ? quibus auxiliis ? cur ? quomodo ? 
quando ? " 

Chatter in conformity to rules is also the object of 
so-called Homiletics, the rhetoric of the pulpit, in 
accordance with which the greatest dullard can weld 
together a methodically ordered discourse. 

It was necessary to refer to the " Topics" of Aristotle, 
because the categories of the Logic, and the " loci " of 
the " Topics," twist and turn them as you will, indicate 
one and the same obscure conception. I will show 
this briefly, and I shall not be to blame if the reader's 



HANS RALDUNG GRIEN 




ARISTOTLE AND PHYLLIS 



<^iiisroTLe gi 



respect for Aristotle's depth of thought is not thereby 
enhanced. 

His intention, in the " Topics," is to give directions 
how to find out what may be said on any given subject 
of discussion. From the expression " to find out " — 
unless it had been used by others before him in a 
technical sense — he may have got the idea of calling 
the different points of view "places," or tottoi. I call 
attention to the circumstance that in our language also 
** point of view " primarily signifies a place ; so that 
the Greek expression is by no means so strange as it 
seems. Now, if we express somewhat more learnedly 
the object of Aristotle's " Topics," we may call it a 
guide to the discovery of the points of view from 
which this or that may be said or predicated about a 
subject. But since " category " also simply means a 
general predication, or general point of view, the 
definition of the " Topics " results in this absurdity, 
that they teach how to find out general points of 
view about general points of view. Any trite phrase, 
which no longer attracts the least attention, is now- 
adays termed a commonplace. In Prantl's "History of 
Logic " I have not met with the history of this expres- 
sion. But clearly common places, " loci communes," 
are nothing else than a translation of Aristotle's 
" TOTTOI," which again coincide confusedly with 
his categories. Thus already among the ancients 



g2 .^liisTorLe 



the categories of Aristotle had become common- 
places. 

The father of logic busied himself as little about 
sharply defined words as about clearly differentiated 
grammatical notions. The idol of his worship was the 
common speech of men. 

He was not without a certain purblind perception of 
this fact ; but he hardly looked upon it as a defect. 
In his terminology he uses "analytical " in the sense 
in which we, at the present day, use " logical " ; what 
he means by " logical " is approximately the same as 
" rhetorical." 

Very attentive readers will here meet me with a 
weighty objection. In my opinion Aristotle must 
have tried to draw up his categories on an analogy 
with the parts of speech without, however, having 
a clear notion of the latter, whatever may have been 
the source from which he got their distribution. 
If, then, Aristotle's scheme of categories is itself mis- 
taken, it may be argued that it should be possible to draw 
up an improved scheme based on an improved science 
of grammar. But with this view I am in entire 
disagreement, since I deny in toto that the forms of 
grammar are anything more than accidental analogies 
of individual languages, and I furthermore assert 
that the actual world of realities is as little classified 
according to categories of the mind as the primi- 



tive languages were according to categories of 
grammar. 

Aristotle's dependence on the usages of common 
speech betrays itself in almost every sentence of the 
Organon. This is shown especially by his uncertainty 
when the number of the categories comes in ques- 
tion. Prantl has made an exhaustive collection of the 
passages bearing on this point (i "Anmerk." 356). 
I pass over the cases in which Aristotle evidently only 
wishes to refer to the first three categories, and con- 
tents himself with a sort of " et cetera." But there are 
other instances also in which he repeatedly hesitates 
over the categories of " who " or " what," of quantity 
and quality, and gropes after an impossible inclusive 
formula for the remainder. A most important point of 
view with him, evidently, is the passive form of the verb, 
and the undefined activity of motion. But he is unable, 
for example, to recognise in every instance the active 
meaning of a verb when (as so often in Greek) it has 
a passive form. Thus, the two statements, " he has 
consumption." and " he is consumptive," in spite of 
their identical meaning, he would have brought under 
two diff^erent points of view or categories, since, in the 
one case, " having," and in the other case " being," 
is predicated. His teaching on the categories is the 
" Topics " in a modest form. 

In order to give an unprejudiced reader a sample of 



g4 ^liisroTLe 



the really puerile talk in which Aristotle could indulge 
I will here quote from the last chapter of his doctrine 
of the categories, in which he has summed up what he 
has to say on the category of " having." I need not 
explain that he is thinking solely and exclusively of 
the Greek use of the word EXfiv, " to have." Were 
I, since Aristotle's whole method of thinking claims 
to have a permanent authority in all ages and among 
all people, to translate this passage according to the 
sense in which it would have been understood by 
Greeks, it would lend itself to yet wilder absurdity. 
So that, in using the version of Kirchmann, who has 
spared no pains to bring a modern meaning into the 
thing, I am really doing the ancient master of philosophy 
yet another kindness. In this translation the complete 
chapter reads as follows : 

" ' Have ' is used in different senses, sometimes it means a 
property or a condition or any other circumstance : for we say, 
that such an one has a science or a virtue ; sometimes the 
word is used of size : for example, when any one has a certain 
magnitude : for then we say of him that he has a magnitude 
of three or four yards : sometimes the word is used of 
bodily clothing, e.g., of a mantle or a coat ; some- 
times of that which a man has on some part of his person, 
e.g., of the finger-ring on his hand ; sometimes of a 
man's members, e.g., the hand and the foot ; some- 
times of that which is contained in a vessel ; thus, e.g., 



the bushel has the wheat or the jug has the wine ; for 
we say that the jug has (holds) the wine, and the bushel 
the wheat ; we use ' have ' for all sorts of things in the 
same way as in the case of a vessel. Also ' have ' is used 
in respect of property, for we say some one has a house or 
a field. We also speak of having a wife and say that 
the wife has a husband. . . . This meaning of 'have' is 
the most foreign, for by ' having ' a wife we understand 
neither more nor less than to cohabit with her. Perhaps 
other meanings of ' have ' might be pointed out, but the 
examples cited above give a summary of the meanings most 
commonly used." 

All attempts, even those of Prantl, to give to the 
categories of Aristotle any deeper significance than a 
verbal one, must in the course of time cease to make 
any serious impression. If I were to try and compress 
my critical remarks on the categories into a small 
compass, they would amount to this : Aristotle's plan 
of bringing the most abstract analogies of language 
into correspondence with the most general analogies of 
reality broke down, and was bound to break down, 
lamentably because of his innocence of any theory of 
knowledge, an innocence which was as entire in 
the domain of language as it was in that of reality. 
If we, infinitely better equipped with knowledge 
in both these directions, attempt to revive the old 
plan, we reach — in accordance with our several 



g6 ^'^STOTLS 

conceptions of the universe — the same or a still more 
important result, the conclusion, namely, that the most 
general conceptions of language do not and cannot 
correspond to the most general analogies of reality, that 
Categories of Reality do not exist. After thus con- 
sidering the foundations of Aristotle's Logic, I ought 
to restate critically his representation of the doctrine 
of thought itself. I have endeavoured to discharge this 
task in my " Critique of Language " when speaking of 
the Current Logic. For the subsequently codified logic 
vi^hich, to-day, is still treated with general respect is, 
even in its merely technical features, much more a 
creation of Aristotle than Prantl is willing to admit. 
He delights only in turning his master's obscurities 
into profundities. I feel certain that Aristotle, in 
accordance with the whole bent of his mind, would 
have greatly admired his successors for having, as a rule, 
reached, through their mechanical system, what he had 
tried to reach by inadequate means. 

Aristotle cannot help seeing in mental conceptions 
the foundations of all thinking. But because he was 
not in a position to distinguish clearly between language 
and reality, because he confused, at every step, language, 
the alleged instrument of knowledge, with reality, 
the object of knowledge, there befell him exactly 
what befell Plato. Mental conceptions were to him 
sometimes logical, sometimes real, or, in customary 



<^7{IST0rLS 97 



phraseology, ontological. Apparently he intended 
honestly to overthrow the Platonic doctrine of ideas 
and to deny to mental conceptions any creative 
faculty. But he alvv^ays returns to the fairyland of the 
Platonic theory, and sees again realities in the con- 
ceptions of the mind. He is separated by the width of 
the heavens, from the nominalist teaching. At the 
same time he hides himself behind transparent words. 
In mental concepts, he sees the " essential being " 
or " wesentliche sein " of things, and although the 
two Greek words for " sein " and " wesen," are if 
possible still more clearly identical than the German 
terms, he does not perceive the tautology. If we 
wish to make the best of the Aristotelian doctrine of 
mental conceptions, and the whole Logic, we may 
say that their author left the Greek theory of know- 
ledge cleaner than he found it. The Sophists, as 
the charwomen of philosophy, had preceded him with a 
great pretence of scouring the language, and in doing 
so had made plenty of noise, dirt and lies. The house, 
as I have said, looked cleaner after Aristotle than it 
did before ; but its poverty was, thereby, made only 
more apparent. 

If in his doctrine of mental conceptions Aristotle 
is not far removed from the mythological idealism of 
Plato, in his doctrine of the syllogism the mental con- 
ception grows from a real entity into a downright 

G 



g8 .A'EJSrorLS 



living organism, which, in contact with other con- 
ceptions and especially with that of the middle term, 
has the power to bring new and kindred beings into 
the world. If this phantasy contained a grain of 
truth, then the original Aristotelian doctrine of 
thought, intertwined, as it is, with the " Topics," 
would be in every way more valuable than the 
later logic, built upon Aristotle, as it has slowly 
developed itself up to the present day. This later 
logic, with its much more precise and sharply defined 
formulae, leads to no fresh knowledge ; the conclusion 
never advances beyond the premisses, the mental con- 
ception, as I have shown, never ends in anything 
except tautology. If the existence of productive 
mental conceptions possessing the creative faculty 
could be proved our intellectual possessions would 
be beautifully enriched. But, as a matter of fact, 
this assumption of Aristotle is in sorry case. By 
the aid of formal logic we have indeed got no 
further than a survey of our knowledge, than 
so-called " Laws," which actually are nothing 
more than convenient verbal generalisations of un- 
explained but more or less correctly described phe- 
nomena, which through certain resemblances have 
impressed themselves in common on our memory. 
But Aristotle, with his mental conceptions, did not 
even arrive at such poor " laws " as these. He 



has not even the scientific impulse of our investi- 
gators and expounders of the lav/s of nature. He 
is in the strictest sense of the expression, as used 
by us, an unscientific thinker. Quite mechanically 
he is always striving to subordinate his mental con- 
ceptions to others of a higher and more general order, 
so that each branch of his system may culminate in 
some one sovereign conception or rather proposition. 
We are still juggling to-day, in all our modern 
languages, with the words used by Aristotle to describe 
such first principles, or with bad translations of them. 
Some of them — maxim for example — have withdrawn 
themselves into the antiquated sphere of Ethics. 
Others — such as axiom and hypothesis — were not 
examined critically on their merits till the nineteenth 
century. For us there can be no doubt whatsoever, 
that these ultimate principles are only words or else 
propositions by means of which we make solemn 
definitions of highly abstract words, while secretly 
fitting them into the current language of one or other 
branch of knowledge. I put it thus : axioms are 
such highly abstract words in the inexplicable 
value of which the learned and the vulgar alike 
believe implicitly. Hypotheses are similar words, in 
the value of which the learned only pretend to 
believe. Postulates — which have also taken refuge, 
with or without shame, in the sphere of Ethics — 



100 ^'^RJSrOTLE 



arc hypotheses in which, properly speaking, no one 

believes. 

^ ^ ^ ^ ^ 

In many passages of my "Critique of Language" I 
have been obliged to declare that the branches of learn- 
ing w^hich belong especially to this subject, acquire a 
deceptive importance, from the fact that the cleverness 
expended upon them is out of all proportion to the 
abstract thinking capacity of the average man. Ety- 
mology on the one hand and logic on the other play 
such a brilliant and entertaining game with words that 
inquisitive children and sages are, for a long time, 
delighted with these variegated fireworks. Before a 
man sees through the delusiveness of the whole pro- 
ceeding, before he despairs of the value of such sport 
as a means of acquiring real knowledge, the poor 
devil has to die. And thus from age to age the pastime 
is reverently handed down, until after many genera- 
tions the tempest breaks, and a mental revolution sets 
in, which seeks to discriminate clearly between sport 
and science. 

We have an instructive example of the naif manner 
in which, in classical times, the boundaries between 
logic, the nominal basis of all philosophy, and childish 
pastime could be wiped out, in the learned theory of 
the riddle as propounded by an immediate disciple of 
Aristotle. Every word-riddle constituted a logical 



^T^ISTOTLS loi 

question or problem which had to be treated exactly 
like the other problems of the " Topics." Such was 
the pleasure taken by the ancients in sophistical debates 
that the setting of problems formed a part of social 
entertainments. In educated circles it was a favourite 
amusement to raise questions in this way and to 
devote all the devices of semi-cultivated talk to their 
discussion. The setting of riddles also was one of 
these jeux de societe or table-games. Among the more 
intelligent young folk of our educated classes the same 
sort of pretty game is sometimes played at social gather- 
ings in which some one, by means of questions and 
answers, restricted always to " yes " or " no," has to 
find out a hidden word already fixed on. If the young 
questioner has some command of language and is quick 
at catching associations of thoughts, he is able, without 
too much expenditure of time, to guess not only 
such concrete things as the little pearl on the head of 
Miss Dora's pin but even abstract qualities, such as 
the virtue of Lucretia. Our young people think this 
a capital way of whiling away an hour, and have not 
the slightest idea that they are thus indulging in 
logical exercises in the spirit of the school of Aristotle. 
It may sound hard to bring down the life work of 
the most famous philosopher, the pride of two thousand 
years, to the level of a drawing-room game. But it 
must be stated in plain language, to what an extent 



102 •^lilS'TOTLe 

Aristotle has become a dead letter in the intellectual 
life of the present day, when the resources, material 
and intellectual, of an Academy of Sciences are being 
expended at this hour, in a manner worthy of the 
Alexandrians, on the study of his philosophy. 

Aristotle is dead for us — even for those among us who 
still stick fast to the historical standpoint, he can no 
longer be considered living. He really believed that 
his age had reached the final limit of human develop- 
ment, the final limit in political and social life, in 
science and art. He beheld with wonder and admira- 
tion the glorious extent of human advancement. The 
philosopher who proposed to give a general explanation 
of " being " by " becoming," had no conception of the 
process of " becoming " in the human mind. For him 
it was a settled question that man possesses all senses 
possible for him. He had not the faintest notion that 
even the human senses are only accidental. 

Aristotle is dead for us because he had no sense of 
personality, that supreme happiness of such mature 
children of earth as Goethe. It is not only that the 
Greek knew nothing of the modern conception of the 
rights of man, that he was the apologist of slavery ; no 
— in art and life his ideal was the normal man subject 
to vulgar laws of thought. The mediaeval nominalists 
who regarded the individual as the only real entity? 
and thus unconsciously extolled personality, appealed 



.AlilSrOTLE 103 

no doubt to Aristotle ; but only in the sense in which 
at that time all the world appealed to him. In contrast 
with the poetical doctrine of ideas of Plato he was dry 
and prosaic enough to forfeit all claim to be considered 
an idealist. But for a consistent nominalism he had 
not a single qualification. He had no sense of the 
nobility of personality. In spite of his far-reaching 
scientific activities he was himself in nowise a 
philosophic personality. The man of the middle 
course, the thinker without creative power, the author 
without convincing force was no philosopher. 

Aristotle is dead because he was, more than per- 
haps any other notable writer in the whole history of 
Philosophy, superstitiously devoted to words. "The 
voice of the public, although it consists exclusively of 
ordinary minds, is for him authoritative and worthy 
of respect." Therefore even in the investigation of 
the most difiicult questions he prefers to start from the 
opinion and the speech of the common people. 
General agreement may be presumed to be an 
approximation to the truth. Even in his logic, even 
in his doctrine of categories, although there the 
whole point was to use a deeper method of inquiry 
than that supplied by common speech, he is absolutely 
dependent on the accidents of language, on the 
accidents of his mother tongue. And perhaps it is 
owing precisely to this linguistic servility of Aristotle 



104 ^liisroTLe 

that the language of science has for such a long time 
remained under the bondage of his logical terminology. 
For indeed he has influenced the technical language 
of philosophy more than any man before or after him. 
He appears to rule while he himself is subject. His 
superstitious reverence for words was never out of 
season. 

The still secretly potent influence of Hegel's con- 
ception of history and philosophy, and also his word- 
worship, as shown in his belief in a reason in history, does 
not allow thrice dead Aristotle to rest in peace. There- 
fore it is not, perhaps, useless, in speaking of Aristotle, to 
discard all reverence for the estimation in which he is 
held in history. The history of great reputations is a 
portion, and not the smallest portion of the history of 
human culture. The/4story of great names is yet to 
be written — of suchinames as Homer and Virgil, 
or later, as Shakespeare and Spinoza. But the 
history of great reputations, like that of other things, 
is an outcome of accidental circumstances, and the 
history of Aristotle's twenty centuries of fame is a 
history of a series of accidents. 

It was a remarkable accident that of all the Greek 
writings which gave a broad survey of the ancient 
world in his days, precisely those of Aristotle should 
have survived. Another accident — using the word 
always as opposed to the idea of a reason in history — 



<^i{isrorLe 105 

provided that the decadence of Hellenism, that 
Alexandrianism and its commentators followed imme- 
diately on the footsteps of the teacher of Alexander 
the Great. Yet another historical accident allowed 
the supremacy of Western culture to pass into the 
hands of the Romans who copied almost wholesale 
from the Greeks, and thus adopted Aristotle also, in 
his Alexandrian guise, and bequeathed him as the 
universal lexicon of knowledge to their heirs the 
newly civilised nations of Europe. Yet another 
accident brought the verbal distinctions of Aristotle 
into touch with Christendom, which from lowly 
beginnings had become a spiritual and political power. 
Yet another accident placed certain writings of the 
philosopher in the hands of the Arabs, brought them 
under revision by Semitic stui mts of nature, and thus 
by strange and roundabout pat 'is enlisted them in the 
service of Christian scholasticism. Thus Aristotle 
became a great philosopher for antiquity, thus for 
the Middle Ages he became ^^ summus phiksophus." 

Ancient and Christian scholasticism differ in many 
points. The ancient system was not yet subject to any 
Catholic or universal Church dogma. Therefore the 
Renaissance, in its attitude of hostility to the Church, 
was able to play off antiquity against Christendom, 
Plato against Aristotle in accordance with the relative 
estimate of their respective reputations which was 



io6 .AiiisrorLE 

then the vogue. Nowadays the Renaissance has said 
its last word. We are now so indifferent to the 
Church that we are hardly any longer antagonistic. 
Confronted by our trend of knowledge, which through 
investigations of the theories of knowledge has 
reached the criticism of language, ancient philosophy 
and Christian scholasticism blend together in one 
uniform mass of word-worship. Out of this mass 
gifted men of genius, pioneers of the new vision of 
the universe, lift their heads. Among such pioneers 
Aristotle is not numbered. 

Goethe was very likely of this opinion also, 
for, in his history of the theory of colour, he speaks 
with affection of Plato, while, despite his tone of 
traditional respect, he directs his profound irony on 
Aristotle, the man of matter of fact. Plato's attitude 
towards the world is that of a blessed spirit, vv^hose 
pleasure it is to sojourn here for a while. He ex- 
plores the depths in order to fill them with his nature, 
ratherf^than to search through them for knowledge. 
" Aristotle on the contrary looks on the world with 
the eyes of a man — of an architect. He is here 
once for all, and here he must work and create. 
He makes inquiries about the surface ; but with no 
further object than to secure a site. From that point 
to the middle of the earth all the rest is indifferent 
to him." 



<^^srorL£ 107 

In still stronger terms has the other great German, 
Luther, whose Christian zeal safeguarded him against 
the dogma of classical antiquity, denounced Aristotle. 
Once he calls him appositely the Prince of Darkness ; 
and in his splendid letter " To the Christian nobles of 
the German nation " he utters his opinion without 
reserve : — 

" The universities also have need of reformation root and 
branch. I must say this, let who will take offence thereat. 
This then is my counsel. Let the books of Aristotle, 
Physics, Metaphysics, de Anima, Ethics, which hitherto have 
been thought the best, be utterly abolished with all others 
which boast themselves concerning natural things, although 
nothing is to be learned from them concerning either 
natural or spiritual things. Besides no one ever yet has 
understood their meaning and so much precious time and so 
many precious souls have been burdened with useless toil, 
study and cost. I dare say that any potter knows more of 
natural things than is written in these books. It makes my 
heart ache that this damned, arrogant, rogue of a heathen 
should seduce and befool so many of the best Christians. 
God has plagued us with him thus, because of our sins." 

And Luther also replies at the same time, by antici- 
pation, to the familiars of the schools, the professional 
men of learning. " No one need accuse me of talking 
too much or taunt me with knowing nothing. Dear 
Friend, I know well what I am saying. Aristotle is 



io8 ^lilSrOTLe 

as well known to me as he is to thee and thy fellows. 
I also have read him and listened to him with more 
understanding than St. Thomas or Scotus. This I 
can boast of without arrogance, and can prove it, if 
needs be. I care not that for so many hundred years 
so much high intellect has worked upon him. I am 
no longer troubled by such objections as I may once 
have been. For it is clear, that more error than this 
has prevailed for several hundreds of years in the 
world and the Universities." 



o^o^^c^^o^O|^o^c^o^^o^o|^^opc^o^c^c^c^o^^o^c^o^c^o^ c^o^ 



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